In What Ways Does Yayoi Kusama’s First Work Show Language, Identity and Culture Notes

• Introduction
  • Through Yayoi’s earliest works, people can understand her identity, culture and language.
• Shows identity:
  • Polka dots: Mental illness- her signature motif
    • Self-obliteration
    • Neurosis
    • Visual and Aural hallucinations
    • The young Kusama dealt with her hallucinations by drawing, and by drawing repetitive patterns to “obliterate” the thoughts in her head. Even at that young age, art became a form of therapy, what she would later call ­“art-medicine.”
    • This obsessive-compulsive repetition helped stave off neurosis.
  • Sadness her Mother felt
    • Womanizing father
    • Often cheat on her
    • sent Kusama to spy on him
• Culture
  • Wearing Kimono
  • Oppressed
  • Artists struggles with societal norms and expectations for her as a women
    • Looking down on art
    • primary role: wife
•  Language
  • • • A way for her to express her self
      • Express emotions she couldn’t interpret with words
      • Everything pointing down
        • mothers gaze
        • background
        • Kimono

• Conclusion
  • Through her earliest works,
  • Reveal
  • Identity, culture
  • Yayoi Kusama repeatedly reimagines pumpkins in her work as a method of preserving and symbolically revisiting to her childhood in Japan and her struggle to become a professional artist
  • This work from her early life shows the development of her work.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/how-yayoi-kusama-the-infinity-mirrors-visionary-channels-mental-illness-into-art/2017/02/15/94b5b23e-ea24-11e6-b82f-687d6e6a3e7c_story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama