Elizabethtown College JayScholar Modern Languages: Student Scholarship & Creative Works Modern Languages Spring 2020 Life's Form and Formlessness: Translating Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Net Mika Thomas Elizabethtown College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://jayscholar.etown.edu/modlangstu Part of the Japanese Studies Commons Recommended Citation Thomas, Mika, "Life's Form and Formlessness: Translating Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Net" (2020). Modern Languages: Student Scholarship & Creative Works. 6. https://jayscholar.etown.edu/modlangstu/6 This Student Research Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Modern Languages at JayScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Modern Languages: Student Scholarship & Creative Works by an authorized administrator of JayScholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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I do not, however, hold Elizabethtown College or the High Library responsible for third party use of this content. Term This agreement will remain in effect unless permission is withdrawn by the author via written request to the High Library. Signature: Mika Thomas Date: May 01, 2020 Life’s Form and Formlessness: Translating Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net By Mika Thomas This thesis is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Elizabethtown College Honors Program May 1, 2020 Thesis Director Mahua Bhattacharya ________________________ Second Reader_____Nobuaki Takahashi____________________ Third Reader__________________________________________ [only if applicable such as with interdisciplinary theses] Thomas 1 Life’s Form and Formlessness: Translating Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net Yayoi Kusama is a world-renowned multidisciplinary artist from Nagano Japan. Her signature mirror rooms have flooded social media websites like Instagram and Twitter. Her strong personal brand and iconic fashion sense has helped solidify her presence as a pop cultural icon throughout the world. She has also played a role in several social movements in America and abroad. Currently, she is arguably the most popular and well-known living female artist in the world. Her captivating work is distinctive due to its trademark forms, hues, silhouettes and patterns. While her work is immediately recognizable, much of its meaning remains enigmatic. For example, in the United States where Japanese is not commonly spoken, language accessibility often limits communicative efficacy especially within fast-faced popular culture. However, there is also the intricate nature of mental illness that makes discussion of Kusama’s artwork even more complex. Regarding evocative artwork, much of an artist’s memories, desires, and fears allow for the manifestation of intimately unique pieces. Kusama’s work encapsulates the often messy, disjointed and oppressed emotions in her life, but she does so in a way that invites others to engage as well. By looking at her work and the cultures that surrounded her life experiences, one can gain a slightly more coherent understanding of the role art plays in both portraying and shaping our beliefs. One can also see how the popular forms of Kusama’s artwork today are the potent culmination of her lived experiences. Thomas 2 1. Early Life Yayoi Kusama was born on March 22, 1929 in the provincial town of Matsumoto in Nagano, Japan. This rural town was surrounded by mountains and the animals that inhabited them. Her family was prosperous and successful in the seed-selling business; they also owned flower nurseries.1 Kusama recalls visiting flower fields often as a child.2 She had an affinity for art from a young age. Some of her early drawings feature realistic renditions of flowers that displayed her dedication and attention to detail. While she was determined to create artwork, Kusama’s mother, Shigeru Kusama, was a stern, conservative, and authoritarian figure in her memory.3 Kusama’s mother did not support her talents. Rather, she had encouraged her daughter towards a more traditional and domestic life of marriage and family. It was thought of as unladylike and unbecoming for a woman to have staunch career ambitions at all, let alone those of an artist.4 Kusama’s mother reinforced those ideals by referring to her artistic endeavors as pointless and fruitless. Kusama also recalls the social climate of Japan as suffocating to her creative ability. For most of her childhood, Japan had been involved in the Fifteen Years War with China (1931- 1945). Japan had experienced a rise in militarist, nationalist and imperialist thought that would consume much of the country before boiling to a head in World War II. This was a difficult time to be a young girl trying to pursue individuality in an artistic career. Like many other children, she was pulled from school to spend long hours working to create military equipment; Kusama had mostly worked in sewing parachutes and gaining skills in handling cloth. Kusama has 1 CAOIMHìN, “Planting A Seed: Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern II” 2 Ibid. 3 Munroe, “Obsession, Fascination and Outrage: The Art of Yayoi Kusama,”13 4 Yoshimoto “Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists In New York,” 48 Thomas 3 commented “I couldn’t escape this militarism because the government wanted it and the schools wanted it...I suffered. It killed my mind.”5 Struggles pertaining to depersonalization and self- actualization frequent much of her work. This is seen in her morbid piece entitled “Accumulation of Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization),”6 which was created in what she refers to as her era of mental breakdown.7 Her work continues to show elements of anti-authoritarianism and anti-war sentiments. Kusama’s mother viciously critiqued her ambition. Kusama recalls instances where her mother had snatched away and destroyed her drawings. However, Kusama continued to make art even as it was destroyed. The turbulent marital relationship between her parents also was a destructive force in Kusama’s life. Kusama recalls her parents’ incessant fighting and how her father would often leave for Tokyo for months at a time.8 Her father, Kamon Okamura, had many affairs that enraged her mother. 9 Kusama’s mother had used her to spy on her father’s affairs and this early vision of sex was traumatic. It began an overwhelming fear and fascination with sex and genitalia. This is even portrayed in her early drawings. She would often escape the physical abuse of her mother by retreating into the bathroom where she would create drawings.10 Some of these drawings depict flowers resembling male and female genitalia.11 These overwhelming fears and obsessive fascinations carry through her life work and arguably changes in function over time, as seen in her later fashion and activist endeavors. 5 Munroe, “Obsession, Fantasy, and Outrage: The Art of Yayoi Kusama,” 13 6 Yoshimoto “Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York,” 50 7 Munroe, “Obsession, Fascination and Outrage: The Art of Yayoi Kusama,” 15 8 Kusama, Infinity Net, 120 9 Ibid 10 Kusama, Infinity Net, 121 11 Ibid. Thomas 4 As a young child, Kusama began experiencing the first symptoms of her psychosis. Her mental illnesses and worldview are often mentioned in discussion of her work because they trace back to the early and formative days of her childhood. She recalls being in a field of flowers and being overtaken by anxiety. Her psychosis involved hallucinations that were both visual and aural. She recalls her own voice sounding like that of a dog, talking flowers with human like faces, and even talking pumpkin at one point.12 Her visual hallucinations were particularly jarring. She recalls an episode where a pattern she had seen in a tablecloth would not leave her vision; the pattern extended all around her before