Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art.
Yayoi Kusama born March 22, 1929 is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono.
Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? By tracing the concept of the bad girl in Japan as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. The essays explore deviancy in richly diverse media. Mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls, and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.
This film follows Yayoi Kusama during the preparations for Tate Modern's 2012 retrospective of her work, when she undertook the mammoth physical and mental challenge of creating 100 new works for the largest-ever exhibition of her art.
In April 1985 Kusama staged a performance in the cherry tree grove at Kuhonbutsu Jōshin-ji, a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Commissioned by a professor at Tokyo University, the performance was titled Basara no Hana (Flowers of Extravagance) in reference to the extravagance of the fourteenth-century lord Dōyo Sasaki. He was said to have held a lavish celebration of cherry blossoms near Kyoto that lasted twenty days. For the performance, Kusama encircled the flowering trees with red and white streamers, connecting them in a ‘net’.
Yayoi Kusama, is a Japanese artist and writer. She started to paint using polka dots and nets as motifs at around age ten ,and created fantastic paintings in watercolors, pastels and oils. Yayoi travelled to the United States in 1957. Showed large paintings, soft sculptures, and environmental sculptures using mirrors and electric lights. In the latter 1960s, she staged many happenings such as body painting festivals, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations. She launched media-related activities such as film production and newspaper publication. In 1968, she produce and starred in the film "Kusama's Self-Obliteration".
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