Visit the Yayoi Kusama special exhibition at the Beijing Normal University Art Museum

#2月好地方2025 A friend of mine has tickets to Yayoi Kusama's special exhibition and invited me to go with him. I went there last night and it was really rewarding. There were free meals at the party, tour guides giving explanations, and finally a free thermos cup as a souvenir. It was really satisfying. Kusama Yayoi, born on March 22, 1929, is known as Japan's living classic artist. She was born in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, and graduated from Kyoto City School of Arts and Crafts (now Kyoto University of Arts). In 1957, she moved to New York City, USA, and began to display her leading avant-garde art creation. She currently lives in Tokyo, Japan. She has exhibited with other contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns. Selected as one of the "Top Ten Avant-garde Artists of the 21st Century" by an American art website. Yayoi Kusama has had auditory and visual hallucinations since childhood. She feels that plants are talking to her and that she sees a world of dots expanding and extending. When she was a child, her mother often forced her to follow her father who was having an affair, which caused her to develop a fear of sex. Therefore, her works contain many dots and sexual elements. She believes that dots have the power to soothe people, and she expresses her fear of sex in her soft sculpture artwork. Figure 1: Obsessive delusion of dots: The balloons covered with dots are of different shapes, like organic cells that proliferate at will. The huge shapes evoke a sense of lightness floating upwards, creating a hazy and weightless sensory experience, making the viewer melt into the endlessly repeated origin and feel themselves merge into one with the environment. This is a reproduction of her 1996 creation of the same name at a mattress factory in Pennsylvania, USA. The exhibition room is covered with wall and floor stickers with yellow background and black dots, and is exhibited together with a balloon installation with the same pattern to create an immersive spatial effect. Figure 2: Pasta Shoes: Showing her fear of machine-made food Figure 3-4: Two types of shoes that show fear of sex Figure 5: Showing the spring land and the integration of creative elements of furniture Figure 6-8 Painted tops. In the 1960s, ready-made clothes were mass-produced by machines and highly standardized. Yayoi Kusama competed with them with handmade experimental clothes. Figure 9: Eternal Return: After experiencing the death of his partner and family, he voluntarily checked himself into a mental hospital in 1977. During his hospitalization, he used his creative work to relieve his pain. Eternal Return consists of 46 stacked boxes, from which colorful soft sculptures slowly crawl out, symbolizing that all beings will be reborn through reincarnation and return eternally to the universe. Figure 10: Works created while recovering in the hospital Figure 12-14: The souvenir shop offers photographed landscapes and souvenirs related to Yayoi Kusama’s works. 📍Address: No. 134, Section 2, Heping East Road, Da'an District, Taipei City 106 Time: 2025, March 14, 7pm