About a seven-minute walk from Waseda Station, one can see people gathering around a stylish white building. This is the Yayoi Kusama Museum of Art, where art and Yayoi Kusama fans from Japan and abroad gather.
Founded by avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama and opened in October 2017, the museum presents Kusama’s works in biannual exhibitions and also hosts lectures. Currently on display at the museum until September 1, 2024 is an exhibit titled “Yayoi Kusama, Painting Figurative Art”.
On the first floor, to the right of the entrance, the latest soft sculpture using boats, “Going to the Red Hot Sea” (2024), is on display. The exhibition here is the world premiere. The oddly shaped boats, created from the 1960s and crowded with countless protrusions, are a symbol of her determined will to push forward the cutting edge of art in New York City.
On the second floor, you’ll find an overview of the figurative expression of Kusama’s works from the beginning of her career to the early 2000s. In the sketches and Japanese paintings she made before coming to the U.S., the collages she worked on intensively from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the prints she has produced since 1979, many of which are figurative depictions, you can see a large number of prints created across her career.
Also of note is “Walking Piece” (1966), a slide show of Kusama dressed in pigtails and kimono, documenting happenings on the streets of New York City.
On the third floor, a series of paintings and soft sculptures, which represent Kusama’s painting career since the 2000s, are on display. They including self-portraits, an important motif of her work, as well as various portraits of human figures. The large canvas in front of the elevator, approximately 2 meters square, is part of a group of paintings from “My Eternal Soul” (2019-2021), a series of acrylic paintings that total over 800 completed pieces.
In the 4th floor gallery, Yayoi Kusama Museum of Art exhibits her Mirror Room piece “Beyond the Infinite, the Pumpkin Cries Out Love” (2017), which was created to commemorate the opening of the museum. Mirror Room is a series of installation works using mirrors that Kusama has been creating continuously since the 1960s, and are famous across the world.
The reflections of the matching mirrors cause the polka-dot pumpkins to spread endlessly in space, evoking the strange sensation of being in a pumpkin patch floating in space.
Beyond the Infinite Pumpkin Cries Out Love (2017)
My beloved pumpkin. My beloved pumpkin among the various plants in the world.
When I see a pumpkin, with the joy that the pumpkin is my everything,
I could not shake the awe I felt.
The majesty born of such a pumpkin and its perpetual and never-ending love for humanity I have captured in this room of mirrors.
Please take a look at this vast pumpkin patch and find the future of human life.
And please find your own way of life.
Yayoi Kusama
On the 5th floor rooftop gallery, visitors can once again encounter “pumpkins”. The “Great Giant Pumpkin” (2024), which contrasts vividly with the blue sky, is a lovely work with a wide, stout form.
For Kusama, born into an old family in the seed and nursery business, flowers and plants have always been a familiar part of her life since she was a child. Among them, the pumpkin work, which Kusama describes as “a reflection of human nature” or “my heart,” is like a self-portrait that is inseparably linked to Kusama herself. Kusama’s solitary yet somehow charming appearance is sure to match the simple appearance of this work, which feels like the artist’s hallucinatory vision has suddenly appeared before our eyes.
The compact exhibition should provide an opportunity for visitors to experience the changes in Kusama’s figurative expression from the beginning of her career to the present.
Yayoi Kusama Museum of Art (107 Benten-cho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo)
👉 See the website here
⏰ Open from 11:00-17:30, Thursday to Sunday only
🎟 Admission is by appointment only. Tickets are available only on the museum website and not at the museum counter.