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A new retrospective of works by Japanese legend Yayoi Kusama at M+ affirms the artist's endless capacity for renewal and reinvention, writes Chitralekha Basu.
Evergreen queen
While most of her fellow pioneers of experimental art from the 1960s are no longer around, Kusama is still active and thriving. Her stock is at an all-time high.
As Jacky Ho, head of Evening Sale, 20th and 21st Century Art Department of Christie's Asia Pacific, points out, "In the past year, Kusama's auction records were broken twice: in Hong Kong (at a Christie's Evening Sale in December 2021, when a pumpkin painting fetched over $8 million) and in New York, when Untitled (Nets) sold at a Phillips auction in May for $10.5 million."
Regardless of what the M+ show might do for Kusama's prospects in the local market, Ho sounds ecstatic about its educational benefit to a Hong Kong audience, saying he plans to go back several times.
While the disarming relatability of pumpkins and polka dots - and the fact that these work well when adapted into merchandise - has boosted Kusama's popularity, it probably takes more than a massive following on social media for an artist to stay relevant and influential in her tenth decade.
While he was putting the show together, co-curator Doryun Chong, already reasonably familiar with Kusama's work, had an epiphany. Struggling his way through the most challenging months of the pandemic, "It made me realize that Kusama had thought about humanity and its relationship with nature and the universe in a deep way for such a long time, and predicted where humanity was going to be."
