ILLUSTRATED:
Yayoi Kusama's Work Collections, Dynasty Gallery, Taipei, 2014, color illustrated, pp. 18-19

This painting is to be sold with a registration card issued by the artist's studio.

FISH
YAYOI KUSAMA

Renowned Japanese female artist and writer Yayoi Kusama is celebrated throughout the world for her unique, unconventional artistic style. This long-lived, productive artist has employed many media forms and art languages over the course of her career, including easel painting, collage, performance art, installation art among others. Her artistic world, a universe of visual illusion and fantasy, is constructed with repetitive dots, grids and patterns. New prospects for her artistic career arose after she moved to the U.S in 1957. In the 1960s, she was already holding exhibitions with contemporary Pop masters such as Andy Warhol. She began to develop a distinctive personal style during the early stages of her artistic career using dots and patterns of high-contrast colors, and the world has since been greatly enticed by her works. Kusama’s style of dress also bears a striking resemblance to her artworks, as does her iconic exaggerated makeup. Kusama once explained that all these visual features originate from her world of fantasy, where dots form boundless infinity nets that are representations of her life.

Critics have attempted to categorize her into various schools of art, including feminist, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, Pop Art and abstract expressionism. However, according to Kusama herself, she is simply an “obsessive artist.” From her works, one may observe her efforts in trying to represent a type of subject matter that is highly autobiographic, “psychological,” and sexual-oriented. In 1966, her performance art “Walking Piece,” which explores the challenges Asian women face in the West, aroused extensive discussions in the U.S. In 1973, Kusama left New York to return to Japan and checked herself into a psychiatric institution in 1977 while insisting on continuing her artistic career.

Unlike Kusama’s other works, this piece does not feature fantastically bizarre plants and flowers of monstrous animosity. The depiction of a small, very ordinary fish reveals the artist’s intrinsic world of gentleness and compassion. She produced this piece in 1980, a time when she was already distanced from the boisterous, lively art scene of New York and had already spent three years of quiet and serenity in the Tokyo mental institution, intent and focuses upon her artistic creation. The artwork encompasses many materials and media, including gouache, pastels, ink and decoupage in the formulation of a tranquility and stillness. Grids encircle the small fish in the center while lines in black ink delineate the three-dimensional space of the intersecting grids to form a well of magnificent profound depth, the occupant of which quietly gazes upward into the outside world. This composition is a perfect embodiment of the artist’s mental state during this stage of her life.FISH
YAYOI KUSAMA