A Private Showing of Yayoi Kusama at M+

My friends Liz and Bernie invited me to a Bloomberg sponsored dinner at M+ in mid April, and I was all too eager to be the plus one here!  What an incredible treat, not only to get a private viewing of Yayoi Kusama's work but also to be treated to good food (and it was really well catered, for such a large event the Polish chef heading it from the Grand Hyatt has some impressive Michelin starred chops) and live music in one of the most beautiful new museums to hit Hong Kong in recent years.  Oh how I love these kind of things. 

It was a really thoughtfully-curated, nuanced and well-balanced exhibition that showcased her diverse works of art (performative, painting, sculpture, prints) in a compelling and disarming way, portraying both her vulnerability and strength.  

The artist has spoken candidly about her mental illnesses and nervous breakdowns that were driven by her explorations of infinity, time, repetition, and death. She uses dots and bubbles, coupled with shadow, repeatedly in her work to evoke timelessness and one could, looking at the sheer scale of some of her works, completely understand how this unrelenting drive to delve into never-ending loops could cause the artist herself to spiral into depression and exhaustion. 

Among the other themes she tackles are objectification, consumption and accumulation, sexism, racism, individuality and the masses... 

What struck me more than any single thing about the exhibit was her courage.  I have been thinking about courage recently; what it is and what it means to have it.  Maya Angelou famously stated that "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently."

That quotation was never far from my thoughts as I wandered the exhibit, pondering the amount of courage it took for Kusama, an Asian woman coming up in the male-dominated art scene in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, to emigrate from Japan (itself a notoriously patriarchal society) to the United States, a stranger in a foreign and distant land, and then to pursue her art and vision with that kind of uncompromising drive and passion. 

Kusama at once appears as a very fragile, petite figure with a detached, almost otherworldly affect, dwarfed by the sheer scale of her work or her surroundings - and yet at the same time her messages and public exhibitions (especially her nude performative art on public beaches, in NYC landmarks and museums as a form of anti-war protest) are loud, bold, provocative, and daring. You could not ignore her message.

Unlike other museum exhibits where the smaller items (posters, ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, music labels) don't hold my attention as much as the big splashy art, here I found myself very much drawn to the powerful themes that so consistently worked their way through the most minor and random of things.   

This hand-painted poster in particular caught my attention.  

They also showed one of her typewritten notes, where she defiantly declared that she didn't want her art to be in museums, because the people that go to museums only go to see and be seen and not for the art itself, and museums as institutions have to kowtow to those desires when she, as an artist, only wanted to make art and be free to make the art that she wanted. Of course the irony isn't lost that her legacy is a full museum floor dedicated to her, but I guess this is the kind of defiance that gets you into a museum after all!

The last bit of the exhibit was really cool and kind of trippy - the mirror infinity installation, an endless series of black balls and dots that are mirrored back and forth between each other into what appears to be forever!

They had a room of mirrors where attendees could only be inside for no more than a minute, because they worried people would get vertigo:

To end, here are some pictures of my meal.  The chef said he took inspiration from her and tried to include dots and color akin to her creations. 

The goodie bag was a cool tote with her octopus dot design in yellow and a bright yellow water bottle which I promptly gifted to Lola.  She has been studying Kusama and went to M+ as part of their art curriculum last month, so she knew what artist I was going on about!