Original subtitles

I convert the energy of life...

into dots of the universe.

And...

that energy...

along with love...

flies into the sky.

I finish a drawing like this in three days.

I come up with new ideas

and my canvas cannot keep up with me.

Kusama was born in 1929,

in Nagano Prefecture, in Matsumoto City,

which is a rural, provincial castle town.

She was the youngest of four children

born to Kamon and Shigero Kusama.

My wish was to be a painter,

so I started making a lot of art from the age of ten.

Since my childhood, I was always painting dots.

When I see them, my eyes get brighter,

and I am always moved.

Kusama describes drawing as a child,

and her mother sneaking up behind her

and tearing the picture out of her daughter's hands.

And that sense of hysteria and panic, I think,

informs Kusama's own process of making art,

where she is working so fast and so furiously

to finish a work before it is torn from her.

There was a deal

that her mother made with her

that if she went to etiquette school,

she could also go to art school.

And Kusama made the deal,

and apparently she never went to the etiquette lessons,

but did go to her art school, and her mother was furious.

One senses a family that was, um...

wracked with interpersonal problems.

Her father and mother did not have such a great relationship.

Kusama's father gave up his last name

to carry on the Kusama family name.

He was powerless in the family,

so he had affairs with other women.

Her mother would send

her daughter Kusama

to spy on him.

Witnessing her father being with a different woman

must have been really traumatic for a young, sensitive person.

Her mother knew about his behavior,

but couldn't do anything about it,

so instead released her anger against her children.

The Kusama family

had a wholesale seed business.

They sold seeds for vegetables, flowers and plants.

They had many employees.

Their business was the largest and most established,

not only in Matsumoto City, but in the entire region.

She's talked to me about being in this field of flowers

on her family's farm, where she had wandered in.

Some kind of trauma happened in the field.

I was surrounded by so many flowers.

When I looked around, I saw the flowers everywhere.

It was this sense of being obliterated by flowers.

So much of Kusama's art

seeks to recreate that experience

in one form or another.

It is literally an experience of being lost

into her physical environment,

of losing her selfhood in this space

that is moving rapidly, and expanding rapidly.

She came across Georgia O'Keeffe's work.

O'Keeffe engaged with the natural world

in a way that is sort of fantastic and dreamlike

and deeply realist as well.

I think there was something about the work

and that here was a great American female artist.

Something clicked in Kusama's head

and she thought, "This is a person that I aspire to be.

This is somebody who can mentor me."

And so she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe.

"Dear Miss O'Keeffe,

Will you please forgive me to interrupt you

while you are very busy

and let me introduce myself to you?

I am a Japanese female painter.

There are very few opportunities to see your work in Japan.

I've only seen one of your original paintings, Black Iris.

It gave me a strong impression.

I felt that I had in me

something which seemed very related

to what lay at the bottom of Black Iris.

Some days ago, I thought of finding your address.

I am going to send several watercolor paintings to you.

I'm only on the first step of a long, difficult life

of being a painter.

Will you kindly show me the way to approach this life?

Yours faithfully, Miss Yayoi Kusama."

I met Kusama

when I was about 20 years old.

There was a movie theater in the central part of Matsumoto.

On the second floor of this theater,

there was a little art gallery.

I think that was her first exhibition.

I helped her with it.

There I was, this young man,

helping Kusama hang her paintings.

Apparently, she was very happy with me.

I couldn't understand her paintings at the time.

I remember they were very strange.

Back then, nobody came to see her exhibition.

Everyone ignored her,

and no one recognized her talent.

At the time,

Japan was a very conservative country;

it was a male-dominated society.

My mother wanted me to become a housewife

and marry into a wealthy family,

so she took away my canvas and paints.

At that time, I had many marriage proposals to consider.

But since I wanted to be a painter,

I rejected them all.

Both my parents were very angry.

Kusama was probably thrilled

when O'Keeffe wrote back to her.

"Dear Yayoi Kusama,

Your two letters came to me, and your watercolors also came.

They are interesting. But I live in the country,

and the art world is in the city.

I'm not young, you know.

I have had all of the things you wish to move toward.

In this country, an artist has a hard time making a living.

You will just have to find your way as best you can.

But I wish the very best for you.

Sincerely, Georgia O'Keeffe."

She looked into potential

exhibition opportunities for me.

I was deeply moved that there was such

a wonderful woman in America.

O'Keeffe gave her advice to come to the United States,

to bring her work with her,

to be unafraid to show it to anybody

who she thought might be interested.

The opposition of her family

and the challenges to become an accomplished artist

must have driven this notion that at some point,

she would have to escape.

At the time,

there were heavy regulations on dollars and yen,

and it was prohibited to send money from Japan to the USA.

It was very difficult to travel to a foreign country.

Even though there were many obstacles,

she decided to go there, almost gambling her life.

I burned about 2,000 paintings by the riverside

and told myself that I'd paint much better than these.

Kusama is among the very first artists

in postwar Japan

to make her way to New York,

where she takes up residence in 1958.

She knew in herself that she had a will

and a vision that was enormous.

She had to smuggle money into the country.

She came to America with dollar bills sewn in her kimono.

When I first arrived in New York,

I went to the top of the Empire State Building.

I promised myself that I would conquer New York

and make my name in the world

with my passion for the arts and my creative energy.

Kusama was coming into the New York art world,

and she was a single woman.

Previous to that, women could be included in group shows,

not one-person shows.

Even some of the women dealers wouldn't show women.

I used to see her cry,

coming back from a visit to the galleries.

She was very aggressive.

She wanted so much to be in the galleries,

but couldn't even get through the door.

She was twice the other.

Not only was she a woman in a male-dominated art world,

but she was also Japanese.

She was not taken seriously by the establishment.

She's wearing current fashions,

and then she starts wearing kimonos for special occasions.

There's a lot of mystery and allure to being an Asian female.

She's trying to survive in this world.

I was really poor at that time.

I was making lots of paintings.

Every day, I was drawing and painting.

That's when I was very fulfilled.

My goal was to create a new history of art in the USA.

That's all I was thinking about.

When I was on the airplane and looked outside the window,

I saw ever-expanding nets on the ocean,

and I made them into my art.

- There is a painting called - Pacific Ocean from 1958,

and Kusama said that that is really the origin

of infinity net painting.

One of the reasons why Pacific Ocean

was so important for her is because when she grew up

in the mountain province of Matsumoto City,

the people who were living there, you know,

their dream of life was really

to go beyond the mountains to see the Pacific Ocean.

My friends asked me

why I kept painting dots and infinity nets.

But I never listened to them.

I just kept trying to make my own world.

I remember a particular gallery opening

where Kusama and I were intensely engaged

in the potential development of her future,

starting with funds, and that she wanted to know,

"Carolee, is there an important man here in this opening?

I have to meet him."

And she was blatant and aggressive and overt,

and she was going to find a patron.

I would see Kusama at the next opening

with a handsome, conventional young man

following behind her,

who had rented her the apartment or the equipment

or the materials.

She did everything there was to do to get ahead.

She was trying to get into Sidney Janis.

That was the number one gallery at that time.

One day, one of the boys came and said,

"Ed, I think your friend just sent some paintings over."

She had sent her paintings over.

Well, they refused it, so they sent it back.

About four hours later, here comes a lady

with one of these real minks,

and they said they'd like to see her paintings.

She had told them that she's in the gallery.

That was Yayoi.

A lot of artists couldn't get into the galleries,

so we started this co-op gallery, the Brata.

I arranged for her to have a show there.

Brata Gallery was located on 10th Street.

It was the birthplace of Willem de Kooning

and Franz Kline.

See, that was the day of the abstract expressionist.

When she showed, her work looked so different

because there was that air.

The paintings were quite tapestry-like,

but they had a wonderful tactile quality.

The impasto continued over the whole surface.

Donald Judd reviewed that show.

His first line in the review is,

"Yayoi Kusama is an original painter."

He went on to talk about the paintings.

He really praised them.

Don was a sculptor and a critic.

A very serious reviewer.

I had a gallery in Washington.

Kusama appeared one day, completely unannounced,

with a young man.

He carried in one painting after another.

I'd never seen anything like it.

They had some kind of magic.

You couldn't stop looking at them,

and you didn't know where they were going.

They were hypnotic.

I was organizing an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art.

Yayoi was not well-known. She was nobody.

And these other artists were all men

and were very well-known.

There was an altercation at one point.

She tried to destroy the whole show.

It was bloody hell.

I went into most of the galleries,

and I saw Yayoi's paintings.

The one that stood out was the yellow one.

I saw New York in terms of yellow and black,

the combination of the taxicabs and the asphalt.

I just casually asked how much it was.

They said it was $75.

And I... You know, it seemed like a lot.

And the next week,

you know, it was preying on my mind, huh...

'cause I really liked it and everything.

And after all, I said, "Okay, I'll do it."

And I paid $25 a week or something.

An art dealer asked me

if I was interested in meeting a reclusive artist.

She asked me to wear my best dress

and come with her.

Mr. Cornell came out from his house.

Joseph Cornell was a great, important artist.

Cornell was so inspiring and strange,

and deeply, deeply suppressed.

He was a surrealist,

and he lived with his mother on Utopia Heights.

Cornell, during the years after his father died,

from a very young age,

was supporting his mother and disabled brother.

The gallery owner wanted to buy Mr. Cornell's work,

but he didn't like selling it to the galleries.

Mr. Cornell requested to be introduced to a pretty woman,

and then he would sell his work.

Every day, he would do telephone attacks,

so it was a lot to handle, and he wouldn't give up.

They would talk on the phone and she would say,

"Joseph, I have to go now."

And he said, "No, Yayoi, just put the phone down.

I'll wait for you to come back."

So Kusama would go out, completely forget about Cornell,

come back a couple of hours later,

find the phone on her bed, pick it up,

and Joseph would say, "Hi, Yayoi."

He was so into me.

He wrote lots of love songs to me.

One time, he sent 14 letters in a day,

and it almost broke my postbox.

And when I opened the mailbox,

all 14 letters came out and scattered on the floor.

Eventually, I went out with Mr. Cornell.

He didn't like sex, and I didn't like sex,

so we didn't have sex.

I was cute and lovely and always dressed nicely,

so I stood out.

So people would stop and look at us like,

"Who is that couple?"

His mother was crazy.

When we were kissing in the garden,

she came out from behind

and dumped a bucket of cold water on me.

I got soaked,

and my nice embroidered dress was completely ruined.

However, he wouldn't apologize to me.

It wasn't, "Yayoi, I am sorry," but, "I am sorry, Mother."

So I was very disappointed.

Eventually, I told him I couldn't go out with him

anymore because I had to paint.

Even then, he kept calling me almost every day.

I fought very hard in New York.

I painted a lot,

and I made many net paintings.

One painting was 33 feet long.

When you do a painting of that size,

in some sense, it stops becoming a painting,

and it becomes a spatial universe.

Her health was always something

that she worried about a great deal.

And I suggested to her that she see a psychiatrist.

By doing Freudian analysis,

I analyzed my psychological problems.

There's some thought she might have had

some traumatic experiences as a child.

She describes coming across her father

in a compromising situation. It's the sort of Freudian notion

that you respond to those kind of traumas

with kind of repetitive obsessional focus

on the object of your fear.

For Kusama, that fear, and she talks about it very explicitly,

was a fear of sex.

Her diagnosis is obsessive-compulsive neurosis.

Once something enters into her mind,

she cannot get rid of it.

My work is based on developing

my psychological problems into art.

Obsession.

Accumulation is the result of my obsession.

And that philosophy is...

the main theme of my art.

Accumulation means that the stars in the universe

don't exist by themselves,

nor does the earth exist by itself.

It's just like when I saw the flowers.

I saw the flowers everywhere.

And when I chased them,

I felt panicked

and so overwhelmed that I wanted to eat them all.

She calls them the "penis chairs" herself.

She has a good eye for what catches attention,

and if she'd called them the "banana chairs,"

they probably wouldn't have been as interesting

to so many people.

Maybe so many people wouldn't have wanted to sit on them.

But I can tell you,

we have to fight to keep people off this chair.

You walk into this group show,

there was Rosenquist,

there's Donald Judd,

and Andy Warhol.

And yet your eyes always return to Kusama's couch.

Nobody bought them, but everybody was talking about it.

Claes Oldenburg had a stiff piece,

made out of papier mâché. And it was a suit.

Claes Oldenburg was making sculptures in papier-mâché

which made a noise if you tapped on it.

He was not doing soft sculpture at the time.

Oldenburg's loft is a factory where he works out

the problems of handling new materials in new ways,

with the help of his wife Pat and other assistants.

I don't think, until he saw Kusama's artwork,

he thought of actually creating a sculpture out of sewing.

It's very unmasculine.

When he did a show in September, I was surprised.

If you looked around, it was all soft sculpture.

There was a calendar, and they created numbers

with soft sculpture.

And then, his wife came over to me

and said, "I'm sorry, Yayoi."

Suddenly, he was an international star.

This really discouraged Kusama so much

because, you know, she also wanted to make her way up

with her soft sculpture.

That really made her depressed.

The installation of the One Thousand Boats Show,

which is her first real installation work,

that was very innovative.

And what she does is she's covered a rowboat and its oars

with these stuffed, soft sculpture protrusions.

Then she has also photographed the boat,

and made a poster and covered all of the walls of the gallery

with that photograph,

so the boat is sitting in the middle

of the photographs of itself.

The idea of covering all of the walls

and creating an installation like that was very innovative.

Andy Warhol came to the show and said,

"Wow, fantastic, Yayoi! I like this so much."

That influenced him, and then he had a show.

He covered the wall with images of a cow.

When I saw it, I was very surprised.

Andy picked up what I did and copied it in his show.

She got very, very shocked.

She couldn't go out from her studio,

and she had to cover all her studio windows.

She didn't want no one to get her ideas.

She was living secretly

and creating a lot of sculptures.

Kusama was creating work of equal importance,

yet she wasn't getting the same backing.

Sexism plays a very major role in this.

And maybe racism as well.

She was taking away

your ability to focus,

breaking all boundaries of space.

The exhibitions that I had, in particular, The Peep Show,

that did the job.

It was an octagonal room,

and there were openings where you could stick your head in.

The ceiling of it...

set up a series of lights.

The rhythm of that machine was, "Brrrrrr!"

When men started devoting themselves

to shooting rockets with themselves in them,

up into the stratosphere,

people became more conscious of infinity.

And she caught that.

There were many artists from the Renaissance on

who were involved with perspective and infinity,

but it was all a fake because you knew,

you the viewer, you were always aware that you were the master,

that it was a painting that was encompassed by a frame,

and the artist was playing with space,

but it wasn't enveloping you.

This was the great breaking point in art.

No longer are you, the viewer, the master.

She's the master.

Lucas Samaras was active in the avant-garde,

radical art scene of New York in the 1960s.

In 1966, about seven months

after Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Room,

Lucas Samara shows a quite similar construction:

a room-like mirrored environment

at the far more established Pace Gallery.

That room was unlike anything Samaras had ever made before.

I think it's fair to say, unequivocally,

that Kusama was the first artist in New York or anywhere

to create a mirrored environment.

There is no question that she was not really

taken up by the establishment in the 60s

when she was doing all that incredible, innovative work.

I became so depressed one day,

and the next day, I became more depressed.

And then I just jumped from the window.

If I had landed on my head, I would have died,

but there was a bicycle, and I fell on it.

Then the neighbors started to gather around.

Sometimes, she would simply appear at the door,

and I would realize that she wasn't well.

And I'd take her upstairs and put her to bed

and look after her for whatever it took,

a week or ten days.

She needed to have somebody take care of her.

Between the lightness and the darkness

of people's shadows...

a bridge to life has stopped me from suicide.

Uncertainty of the unknown, and the fear,

a constant struggle.

Can I overcome this?

And get through today?

And tomorrow and the next day?

- By the mid-60s, - Kusama is showing as much,

if not more, in Europe.

- I went to Italy in 1966 - to put my work

in the Venice Biennale.

I ordered 1,500 mirror balls

to be made in a factory in Florence.

She put mirror balls

in front of the Italian Pavilion without invitation.

I put a sign up saying, "You can buy your narcissism."

Selling your art for a few dollars

to anybody who comes by

is a very subversive idea.

Art is supposed to be expensive, precious, out of reach.

However, the Venice Biennale officials

asked me not to sell them. And I asked them,

"Why can't I sell my art like ice cream or hot dogs?"

She begins in this kimono,

and then when she's asked to leave,

she gets rid of the kimono.

And she is dancing around and lying amid the balls,

and there are all of these photographs of her in leotards,

with her artwork.

She was always aware of the publicity element,

and it gets a lot of attention.

Many people were interested

in my avant-garde art works.

I felt certain that the art of the future

was not nude bronze sculpture,

but the public was more excited about pop art.

In New York City, on 53rd Street,

stands the Museum of Modern Art.

Kusama presented this happening

in the sculpture garden of MOMA.

I protested against the closed-minded system

of the museums.

Their performance lasted until a MOMA guard

started to expel them.

But it was really successful.

My friend Billy told me that I could

stay at this loft

if I allowed her to paint me.

And I was quite excited 'cause I'm thinking "portrait."

It never occurred to me that this literally meant

"paint you."

It's hard to define the expression in her eyes.

She was not looking at you as though you were a human being.

This was a thing that she was going to manipulate,

to color,

to position to where she thought it should be.

I was a runaway.

I felt much more comfortable with gay boys.

It was safer.

A lot of people around me were gay,

because I did not have a boyfriend,

I was not married, and I did not have a child.

I did a homosexual wedding happening.

All the homosexuals were hiding,

so I wanted them to be out in the public without any shame.

I wanted the public to recognize their existence,

so I did a demonstration.

It's quite extraordinary to look back

and realize that Kusama was performing gay marriages

about 40 years ago.

Now I am making a movie,

which is named Kusama's Self-Obliteration.

Kusama wandered into the Gate Theater,

and she came over and said,

"Do you want to shoot my happening when it's going on?"

And I agreed.

- I made a movie called - Kusama's Self-Obliteration,

in which I covered myself in polka dots

until I completely disappeared.

The universe is full of nothing,

ever expanding and ever destroying itself.

Just like a drop that falls in water,

I completely disappear in the universe.

I seek the energy of life.

And I turn it into art.

She had won a prize in Belgium of this film.

She invited me to come to celebrate the opening.

I realized when I got to the box office

that we were not properly dressed.

Everybody was in black leather jackets

and all kinds of hippie-type of clothing.

I felt a little bit embarrassed, but we went in.

We had finished seeing the film and were ready to leave.

Kusama said, "You can't leave now.

People are going to undress." So I told my husband,

and he said, "Well, let's go home."

And then I turned to my mother, and she said, "Let's stay."

And so we stayed.

The threat of the draft was a big deal.

It was a big deal. Very different than anything

we're experiencing today.

These young women and men were sent to Vietnam

and they got injured and killed.

And many returned home and became drug addicts.

I questioned the fact that Americans

were doing something like that.

I thought it was wrong.

She said, "Nudity, it's such a beautiful thing.

Why do we have to send this beautiful body

to the war as soldiers?

She's against the war because of her wartime experience.

Since my childhood, we were forcefully

involved in the war, and everything was confusing.

Even among the students,

the boys were drafted to be soldiers.

The girls had to work in military factories

to make things...

necessary for the war.

I was forced to go to a military factory

and sew parachutes.

She wasn't absorbed

into this totalitarian government.

A lot of people were very much brainwashed.

When I voiced that I was against the war,

even my friends and family told me that I had lost my mind.

I believe such a horrible war should never be repeated.

I made my art to try and change people's minds

about the love in the world that can last forever.

And I wanted to spread hope

to the world through my artwork.

In New York, I did many big anti-war happenings.

Several thousand people

protested against the war with me.

I had a naked happening, and the police came.

They came to arrest me

and asked me not to do the naked happening there.

News about Kusama's naked performances in America

reached Japan as tabloid news,

and people really attacked her.

People said things like, "She is the shame of Matsumoto City,"

or "A woman like that should be killed."

Her name was even removed from the alumni list...

of her high school.

When she did a lot of naked happenings,

and it's being written up in Japanese magazines,

the family was so ashamed that they went to every bookstore

on the day when the magazines were sold

and then bought everything, and then hide it in their house.

Nixon was reelected president.

The country became far more conservative.

And I think it just became more difficult for artists,

who were really pushing the boundaries as Kusama was,

to find a place to work and to function,

both artistically and economically.

The system is set up to support white male artists,

who were carrying on the tradition of modernism.

But there's also elements of the marketplace,

who the collectors are,

who the curators and museum directors are,

and who they feel most comfortable about promoting.

Kusama, who was a marginal figure in every way--

she was a woman, she was Japanese,

she was completely outside of this Western cultural sphere--

she did not get the same kind of support

that the male artists did.

The respect she had earned in the early 1960s

had been relatively dispersed

by her increasingly radical

and, I suppose, populist, attention-seeking activities.

So she was, you know, increasingly disorientated,

disillusioned and depressed.

She went home.

In 1973, I turned on the television,

and Channel 28 was having a fundraiser,

which was an art auction.

I saw this piece by Yayoi Kusama,

so I bid $75,

and I waited, and then I heard that the next bid was $100.

About 20 minutes later, I got a phone call,

and they asked me if I was very serious

about purchasing this piece, so I said yes.

And it seems like the person who did purchase the piece was not.

He was just making a joke.

And at that time, I would be asking different curators

if they ever heard of Yayoi.

And most of them had not heard of her

or did not know what has happened to her.

To go back to Tokyo and to start from scratch again

was quite extraordinary because she wasn't known there,

and she hadn't been recognized, and she was a middle-aged lady.

I felt that Japan was a hundred years behind the U. S.

when I returned to Japan.

They treated me like a very scandalous presence.

All the journalists were very backwards,

and they wanted to portray me in a negative way.

This was the time when she was suffering most

from rejection of the Japanese art world.

The family wasn't there to support her.

That became a very, very bitter experience.

At a time she's lost her father,

I think there were obstacles of some mental health issues.

It was as if an invisible

curtain rolled down,

and I felt separated from my surroundings.

And then, when I was drawing,

the drawing would expand outside of the canvas to fill the floor,

and when I looked in the distance,

I would see a hallucination,

and I would get surrounded by that vision.

Because my childhood memories were traumatic,

I became very depressed.

I couldn't paint anymore.

And then...

I tried to commit suicide.

And so Kusama finds this hospital,

where the doctor is interested in art therapy,

and she checks herself in.

And from the security of that environment,

she's able to work again.

There is a need to fill the hours of every day

with activity,

and the activity that lent itself most easily

to her circumstances was collage.

From seeds to insects

to small, scary, supernatural creatures,

they're very dark.

And they come at a time when she's lost her father...

They're full of this imagery of natural life cycles.

She really had to start from scratch,

looking into galleries to exhibit her pieces.

What was very sad is

she had to rent this place in Matsumoto City,

where she exhibited her watercolors in 1952.

The first time I met Ms. Kusama and saw her artwork

was at an exhibition of her collages.

Since her time in New York,

she was already famous as a scandal queen.

So I thought of her as a scary woman,

and at the exhibition, she was sitting there,

but I tried not to look at her.

I just looked at her art.

When I saw these works,

I thought she was an incredible genius.

I was completely moved.

And I felt a sense of duty

to have her recognized both nationally and internationally.

Ms. Kusama was very misunderstood in Japan

and almost completely forgotten in New York.

She was a genius, so I wanted to re-legitimize her.

However, the chance didn't come around so quickly.

I still didn't have any power.

Over the course of the late '70s and '80s,

Kusama had been obliterated from the histories.

What the Village Voice called "her lust for publicity,"

simply fell out of critical favor.

No museums and no galleries in New York

had shown Kusama's work in over 20 years.

She showed at the Fuji TV gallery,

and it was my encounter with her work,

sculptural work of the early to mid-1980s,

that really inspired in me the will and the conviction

that an exhibition of Yayoi Kusama

had to happen in New York.

We went to visit Kusama in Japan

and collected papers, documents, photographs, and publicity,

which featured a lot of nudity.

When I was bringing these boxes back,

I was stopped at the customs

because they thought I was carrying pornography.

And I had to argue with the customs guys

that actually this was art.

In 1989, I curated the exhibition

A Retrospective

at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, or CICA.

It was a small nonprofit institution.

And it was a sensational exhibition.

Kusama had not been to the United States

since she had left in 1973.

We attempted a full retrospective

going back to her early watercolors from the '50s.

A reevaluation of Kusama's work

was starting to happen in New York and in Japan.

Luckily, the Foreign Minister

asked me to be a commissioner for the Venice Biennale.

I thought it was a great opportunity.

However, since Kusama lived in a psychiatric hospital,

the government official became timid about sending her

as a representative of the country.

"How can she represent Japan?" So I kept that part a secret.

The proposal passed,

and I brought her to the Venice Biennale.

Before Kusama's solo show,

Japan had always shown two or three artists

at the same time.

But for Kusama, I knew that she needed to have a solo show,

because of her strong personality and talent.

I convinced the organizers to do the first solo show

in the Japanese Pavilion.

However, a psychiatrist came with her

and stayed in the room next to her.

Now, she is a lot more stable,

but at the time she was...

afraid of having a nervous breakdown.

I went to the Venice Biennale.

At first, I thought, "Well, gee, look at that!

That's Yayoi!" And there she was.

I was so glad to see her.

For her to have the exhibition

for the 1993 Venice Biennale Pavilion

was an huge, huge transformation

of how Kusama was received and appreciated and recognized

within the Japanese art world.

So she went from crashing the party

and inserting her own work

without invitation or permission

to being the first Japanese woman

to represent Japan at the '93 Biennale.

Consequently, Lynn Zelevanksy

decided to do a retrospective.

Oh, I'm so glad to see you here.

The exhibition that we organized

by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

was called Love Forever, Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968.

Sometimes you can feel something,

almost like a tidal wave under your feet

when you're working on something,

and you know that this artist is gonna be big.

She's created this amazing situation for herself.

The studio is two blocks from the hospital,

so she just walks to the studio every day to do her work,

and then she returns to the hospital at night.

Clearly, the strains and stresses of life,

the memories, have forced her to withdraw.

But what she's always done,

she has always managed that process incredibly well.

And I think there's a sort of a managing madness about Kusama,

which is so utterly sane.

She's used her trauma to enormously productive ends.

After she returned to Japan,

she called me once for some reason.

She now calls me almost every day,

regardless of the time.

Even as her paintings began to sell for a lot of money,

and she became more successful,

she was still lonely.

She had been fighting and fighting,

and then she started getting more recognition.

So she started to see the light.

Her work is still powerful, but her world is brighter.

She hasn't lost her drive...

now that she is an accomplished artist,

but rather her new fantasy world

is manifesting on a very large scale.

Ms. Kusama doesn't do any drafts.

She comes up with something instantly

and then makes a perfect work in the moment.

She's celebrated all over the world,

so she has collectors all over the world,

and she has museum exhibitions all over the world.

Her work transcends boundaries.

It really does appeal to a very broad group of people.

Social media is, for sure, a very specific phenomenon

as part of her success.

She has had five million museum visitors since 2013.

And there's not one artist in the world

who has the same kind of audience.

She's officially the most successful living artist.

She hated Matsumoto,

because they rejected her, they made fun of her,

and they embarrassed her.

Hence, she didn't go back to Matsumoto very often.

Until the 1990s, her artistic activities

still weren't fully appreciated in Japan,

especially in a small town like Matsumoto.

That didn't change

until the Matsumoto City Museum of Art was built.

Since I was a member of the City Council,

I really pushed for her work to be included in the museum,

so that she could be recognized.

Matsumoto City Museum of Art is now a place

one can always see a lot of Kusama's art.

That makes her happy

as well as the citizens of Matsumoto.

There are many children...

that come to the museum just to see Kusama's art.

The Matsumoto children who can start

their art education with Kusama are very blessed.

She had a big show in Matsumoto.

At the reception, Kusama said,

"I was finally able to bring home the crown."

When people in the audience heard that,

they almost wept.

They were so happy that Kusama was finally able to come home

to a hero's welcome.

Now that my life is in the last phase,

I am putting all of my energy into my art.

I hope that the power of art

can make the world more peaceful.

Among waves of people,

I have managed to survive this long life.

How many times did I think...

about putting a knife to my neck, seeking death?

I collected my thoughts and got up again.

I wish for life's bright sunshine.

I want to live forever.

How long have you all been waiting?

- Few hours. - This isn't even

the end of the line. The end's around the corner.