HONG KONG.- M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, will open the museum’s first Special Exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now to the public on Saturday, 12 November 2022, with HSBC as Lead Sponsor. Discover this visionary artist’s groundbreaking career and witness the power of art to connect and heal.

Yayoi Kusama has pursued her art passionately for more than seven decades. As a young artist, she left her native Japan for the United States. She found early success, as well as notoriety, amid New York’s avant-garde scene of the 1960s. After returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama persevered through a lack of recognition and while living with a mental illness to become one of the best-known artists of her generation. Despite facing personal and professional challenges throughout her life, Kusama created a body of work that continues to regenerate, showing us how art can sustain and uplift.

Organised chronologically and thematically, and spanning from Kusama’s earliest work to her most recent output, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now features a wide range of paintings, installations, sculptures, drawings, collages, moving images, and archival materials. The exhibition examines Kusama's practice as it developed in Japan, the United States, Europe, and beyond through six themes: Infinity, Accumulation, Radical Connectivity, Biocosmic, Death, and Force of Life.

Infinity
The idea of infinity is a consistent touchstone in Kusama’s art. Throughout her career, she has created paintings, sculptures, and environments that simulate endless space. In 1957, Kusama left Japan for the United States. Ambitious and determined, she sought to make a name for herself among New York’s avant-garde artists. Inspired by her experience viewing the Pacific Ocean from the aeroplane on her journey, she began to paint Infinity Nets, huge paintings covered with brushstrokes that seem to loop endlessly. In paintings she created in later decades, Kusama continued to incorporate motifs informed by patterns found in nature. Capturing infinity through art became a way for Kusama to express her feelings towards the boundless complexity of life.




Accumulation
Kusama found inspiration as a young artist seeing what she described as ‘a million white stones’ on the riverbank near her childhood home. This appreciation for uncountable abundance informs work she has made throughout her career using techniques of repetition and replication. In the early 1960s, she began creating sculptures by attaching dozens of small stuffed fabric sacs to pieces of furniture and other common objects. These works, which became known as Accumulations, evoke organic growths like buds, tumours, or phalluses. Kusama also created immersive environments in which the fabric sacs appear to multiply and spread to cover the walls and floor. In works from the same period, Kusama used mass-produced objects like pasta and postage stamps as art materials. She described herself as having fallen ‘under the spell of accumulation’. However, creating these works required repetitive, labour- intensive processes, and Kusama was hospitalised several times for mental and physical exhaustion.

Radical Connectivity
Connection and collectivity are important values in Kusama’s art. Her body- painting performances of the late 1960s demonstrate her concept of ‘self- obliteration’, or reuniting the self with the universe by ‘obliterating’ any notion of a unified individual. Many of these provocative public performances featured members of her troupe appearing nude or partially clothed and covered with polka dots. These carnivalesque events were also protests against the US war in Vietnam. Her nude performances further asserted the equality and liberation of human bodies, aligning her personal notion of ‘self-obliteration’ with the broader goals of the Civil Rights and Gay Rights movements. Kusama encouraged press coverage of her spectacular events to reach the largest possible audience. Her presence in mainstream news outlets anticipated the later success of her work on social media.

Biocosmic
Kusama has long identified with plants, viewing them as fellow life forms animated by the same spirit as human beings. Some of her earliest artworks are studies of the plants and flowers she encountered in and around her family’s nursery in Matsumoto, a mountainous region of Japan. Pumpkins became a particular source of fascination and remain one of her most iconic and common references. Her interest in the natural world developed into a mystic philosophy of the universe. The concept of ‘cosmos’ refers to the universe as a system in which all things share an underlying order. With this cosmic view, Kusama seeks to connect the celestial to the individual. In the 1960s, she described her polka dots as a metaphor for the sun, earth, and moon, as well as for individuals within the web of creation. Many of her early paintings capture this ambiguity between galactic and cellular forms.

Death
Making art allowed Kusama to process her fascination with death and persevere through struggles with depression. The direct acknowledgement of these dark feelings carries a powerful message, expressing through art a will to live. Some of Kusama’s earliest artworks address the destruction she witnessed as a teenager during the Second World War. She also observed the cycles of life, death, and regeneration in nature. Kusama experienced a moment of rebirth in her own life after her return to Japan in 1973. After a decade in New York during which she struggled for recognition as a female Asian artist, she departed with a sense of defeat while also grieving for important figures in her life, including her father, whom she lost. Her work from this period shows a deep exploration of death, evoking hope for spiritual renewal after life.

Force of Life
Messages of love, peace, and collectivity have permeated Kusama’s art since the 1960s. For her, art is a meditative and therapeutic practice that she undertakes to transform her struggles. In her later career, the force of life and the healing power of art become dominant themes. Kusama often makes connections between her mental state and the social conditions she observes. War, industrialisation, and environmental degradation are disorienting collective experiences. Lamenting the violence of the world at the turn of the millennium, Kusama declared that she would ‘create art for the healing of all mankind’. The works in this final room attest to her words.