Where Visual Arts Meets Emotional Wellbeing - Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama’s Life Story

Content Order

• From Where It Began

• Schizophrenia and Moving to the States

• Conclusions & Aspirations

From Where It Began

Yayoi Kusama (aka Queen of Polka Dots) was born in 1929, in Matsumo, Japan, to a conservative Japanese family. At the age of 7, Kusama’s auditory and visual hallucinations began. As a developing child, Kusama attended the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts post WWII, where she was deemed “not passible” for her craft.

At the age of 20, her parents began their hunt for eligible suitors--having planned to arrange a marriage of convenience for Yayoi Kusama. Kusama described the era of her 20's as “[her] era of mental breakdown,” as she began to feel increasingly like “a prisoner surrounded by a curtain of depersonalization.”

Schizophrenia and Moving to the States

At Yayoi’s first show in Japan, her visitor Dr. Shiho Nishimaru presented a paper titled “Genius Woman Artist with Schizophrenic Tendency.” He recommended her leave from home, to the states, in hopes of artistic opportunity and mental health rehabilitation.

Having moved to New York in the late 1950's, Kusama struggled in the world of art, dominated by men, alongside the Americas---where anti Japanese sentiments (post WWII) remained high. She began to blend abstract expressionism, pop art, and feminism in her live art “happenings,” exhibitions, & partnerships among other rising artists. As her popularity grew, so did media backlash. Her family stopped sending her money. A fellow artist, Joseph Cornell, passed two years later. By illness, her father died in 1974.

Conclusions & Aspirations

In 1977, Yayoi Kusama self-admitted to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill (in Tokyo, Japan)---never having checked out. Kusama continues her artistic pursuits as she works in her studio during the day, returning to the institute by night.

In 2017, Kusama founded the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Japan, a project also part of her lifelong mission in understanding her hallucinations and neurosis whilst providing a platform for advocacy and awareness on mental illness.