THE PLACE TO BE
BRIGHT STAR: Yayoi Kusama’s installation The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away is on show as part of three new exhibitions devoted to her work.
YAYOI KUSAMA/DAVID ZWIRN
APAN’S BEST-KNOWN sculptor, painter and installation artist, Yayoi Kusama, is having a moment. Or to be more accurate, another moment. Kusama, who sufers from hallucinations and who, since 1977, has chosen to live in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, first found success in Japan in the 1950s. She built on it in New York in the 1960s, painting naked people with her signature colored polka dots; disappeared from public view in the 1980s—and then bounded back, dressed as a witch and representing Japan with a room full of pumpkins at the Venice Biennale of 1993. Since then, she has shown at institutions from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and, by 2014, was officially—at least in terms of museum attendance—the world’s most popular artist. She turns 88 this year, but isn’t slowing down: Three exhibitions of her work open in February.