Footprints of Life ─ Kusama Yayoi
Time | 2015/01/26 - 2015/03/05 08:30-18:00, Monday to Sunday
Venue | 1st Floor Lobby of Taishin Holdings Building
The exhibition is free of charge.
At the age of 86, Kusama Yayoi, known for her signature polka-dot pattern, remains a highly visible artist in today’s contemporary art world. Her work of Footprints of Life, shown at the Lobby of the Taishin Holdings Building, is an installation consisted of 15 various sizes of organically-shaped blocks in pink with black dots. This work echoes Kusam’s artistic concept, which is to invite the audience to once again examine the public space that has been taken for granted.
The showing of Footprints of Life at the Taishin Lobby is made possible by the Taishin Bank’s sponsoring the first-ever touring exhibition of Kusama Yayoi in Taiwan, first at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in February and then at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in June.
The artist describes the idea of Footprints of Life: “I created this work as a symbol of the supreme footprints of life; it encompasses the struggle and joy of this world, my cosmic view, the infinite longing and reverence for the universe’s mystery, the long-lasting joy brought about by a sense of being touched, as well as the footprints of my life as I persevere and hold on to my art and thinking.” She once said that all these visual characteristics come from her illusion. In her opinion, these dots have come to form infinite nets, representing her life. Moreover, she has also developed a unique thematic feature of “reproduction”—in many of her works, there are shapes resembling groups of mushrooms. In her works, one could see that she attempts to display things that are biographical, psychological as well as sexual.
The Artist—Kusama Yayoi
Kusama Yayoi is the master of Japanese contemporary art. Born in Nagano Prefecture in Japan in 1929, she moved to New York in 1956 and began to create avant-garde art that has led her to a dominant position. Kusama’s work has been labeled with many artistic trends by critics, including feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism. However, in Kusama’s own words, she is simply “an obsessive artist.” The Times has listed Kusama as one of the “Top 200 Artists of the 20th Century.” In her early works, Kusama has already developed her own distinctive style; she made excellent use of colorful, contrasting patterns of dots and mirrors to cover up the surface of different objects, such as walls, floors, canvas, and other objects usually found in ordinary households. Active for the past six decades and still creating today, her works spans a remarkable diversity including fashion, literature, film, installation and more.
