It will be a long time before I look at polka dots and not think of Kusama Yayoi. She is, of course, the famous and prolific 85-year-old Japanese artist who had her first solo Asia tour exhibition of her recent works, ‘A Dream I Dreamed’, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Shanghai recently. I found the show to be an extraordinary experience transporting me to another time and space which was uncanny.

In the eight-and-a-half decades of her life, Yayoi has continued to innovate and reinvent herself through drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations and performances. She is also a novelist.

From beginning to paint using polka dots at the age of 10, to travelling to the United States in 1957 where she showed soft sculptures, large paintings and installations, the artist with her obsessive compulsive personality disorder, has probably devoted her life following the maxim that ‘life is all work and no play’.

However, she has turned work into play and mesmerised everyone who has had the opportunity to see her works. Apparently, by the early ’70s, she had moved back to Japan and into a mental hospital in Tokyo where she stayed for several decades, almost forgotten by the world of art.

Regarded as one of the most important contemporary living artists in the world, Kusama Yayoi reinvents herself through drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations and performances

Regarded as one of the most important contemporary living artists in the world, Yayoi’s recent exhibition is curated by Kim Sunhee, Director of Daegu Art Museum, South Korea.Yayoi was at the centre of the art world in the 1960s, coming into contact, amongst others, with artists Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg.  Kusama’s pieces have been collected and treasured in more than 100 museums around the world. She was nicknamed the “Princess of polka dots” in the ’60s when she lived in New York.

Dots obsession (vinyl balls and mirrors)

Walking into the MoCA, I was first confronted by a very large red ‘beach ball’ covered with white polka dots. The vinyl ball was resting on the ground, and there was a long queue of people waiting to go up to an opening in it. Other big polka dot balls hung from the ceiling and completed the outer look of this installation but eager to see what was being shown inside the dome structure on the floor, I, too, joined the queue. Titled appropriately, ‘Dots obsession’, inside it were several small red-and-white polka-dotted vinyl balls that either sat on a mirrored floor or floated in the mirrored space, all reflected many times. So who could tell how many of them there were to begin with.

As in the above-mentioned installation, the infinity theme is at the basis of Yayoi’s ‘Infinity mirrored rooms’. Going into her darkened immersive mirrored environments certainly induced awe and trance as the infinitely reflected field of stars and other forms sparkled and danced in front of eyes. It was truly magical. She has been possessed by this obsession with mirrored rooms since 1965.  My favourites were two such rooms: ‘I’m here, but nothing’, and ‘In gleaming lights of the souls’.‘I’m here, but nothing’ is an ordinary darkened room full of everyday furniture and accessories that has been turned into a surreal experience viewing the fluorescent polka dots of every imaginable colour in it on every surface. Perhaps this is what hallucinations are all about and the artist relives her mental state, visualising the world in psychedelic colours and forms.

If this was surreal, I was completely amazed by ‘In gleaming lights of the souls’. Stepping into this small dark room, one is dazzled by thousands of lit orbs, tiny in size but that vary in colour as well as their intensity. The room is mirrored on all four sides, producing endless reflections, and there is also a shallow pool of water on the floor. There are other installations such as the three large yellow pumpkins tracing the linear grooves in the skin of the vegetable with black polka dots in a linear pattern, or the organic forms jutting out of the floor. But her giant polka-dotted tulips in a polka-dotted environment are dazzling. The repetitive dots are on the flat surfaces as well as on the three-dimensional tulips.

However, the artist impresses me with her large paintings and black and white drawings too. She started painting her series ‘My Eternal Soul’ in 2009 and has now reached up to more than 300 paintings. She improvises her dots and nets motifs and creates beautiful imageries of figurative and abstract designs. The colours of her paintings are bright and striking. Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs visited her in 2006, and the two have collaborated. She has produced fabrics and other products too.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 8th, 2014