BELGIUM: Yayoi Kusama, a sectioned Japanese artist, woos Belgian children with giant dots at art exhibition

A renowned Japanese artist who lives and works in a Japanese psychiatric hospital is exhibiting for the first time in Belgium. World renowned Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama exhibited her work for the first time in Belgium this month (October). Baptised 'Dots Obsession', it is a collection of giant inflatable balloons and is housed in the huge Wiels exhibition centre, a former brewery-turned-gallery in Brussels. The balloons are so large that visitors can walk inside them. The dot pattern Kusama uses is one she has been working with for more than 40 years. Dots have inhabited Kusama's private world since her childhood, when she felt submerged by a proliferation of black spots. By playing with different levels of scale, reflection and repetition, Kusama is trying to provoke a feeling of vertigo and disorientation in the observer. This was lost on the children who came here on an 'all saints' school holiday. Instead they enjoyed the warm, comforting and cocoon like interior of the giant balls. The Wiels centre says it wants the children to have fun as a means of discovering and enjoying art through play. "I think people can only really enjoy this exhibition if they are actors. If we look at it passively, without touching, without letting it sink in, I think it doesn't really work. That's why it works so well with children: because they are really full on, they get it immediately and they let go immediately; they understand at once how it works, they take possession of the balloons in which they walk into and perhaps more than adults," said Frederique Versaen, responsible for education in the Wiels centre. One of the young visitors, Manuel, said the balls reminded him of football. "It makes me think of soccer balls" said Manuel, one of the children taking part in the activities. "A giant soccer ball" said another child. Manuel added "It looks like the black dots are the goals and you kick the ball in" Kusama has exhibited her works across the world in renowned centres such as New York's MOMA and the Biennial in Venice. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, she is widely seen as a precursor of Pop art, Minimalism and Installation art. She moved in the same circles as Jasper Johns, Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol in the United States, and Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein in Europe and by the 1960s she was accepted into the New York and European avant-garde scenes. She once said that what the only thing that separated her from her contemporaries was that she was able to produce the same intensity of work without using drugs. However her life has not been without difficulties. In 1977, Kusama was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Japan suffering from atypical neurosis. She never left, but is still an active artist and continues to produce work from the hospital.

ITN Source | November 5, 2007

Tags:. .goals. .andy. .suffering. .born. .soccer