On reflection

The Yayoi Kusama exhibition Mirrored Years that opens tomorrow at the City Gallery is a flagship of global culture. The curators are Dutch (Kusama exhibited regularly in the Netherlands during the sixties), French and Korean, the artist Japanese, the originating gallery Dutch, and here it is in New Zealand after a stopover in Sydney. The lead curator is Jaap Guldemond. Based at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, he has previously assembled a number of nation-based exhibitions including overviews of Brazil and China. To create Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years he enlisted curators Franck Gautherot and Seung-Duk Kim from Le Consortium in Dijon. The two have worked together for some time and with Kusama since 1990.

As publicity for the exhibition foregrounds, Kusama was a big presence in New York in the sixties and closely associated with many of the leading artists of the day. Her work from the critical years 1958 to 1968 was the subject of her major 1998 MoMA survey Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama. Mirrored years links her more recent work back into this period.

Like some other artists who have become favourites of public institutions, Kusama has shown a remarkable ability to popularize her work, merging her commercial brand with public art projects. Along with Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, Kusama is a whirlwind producer who totally gets the demands of the publicity machine, the appeal of fashion and our global attraction to celebrity. Obsessed with self-image like Warhol, production-driven like Koons and commercially savvy like Hirst, she is a 21st century diva.

Kusama was the first Japanese artist to appear on the cover of Art in America and her recent work is sought after for biennales, art fairs and public display. Co-curator Franck Gautherot summed up Kusama’s driving force, "What she really wanted was to be famous, and she was very calculated and strategic to achieve that." The market, bless its heart, backs up her fame; one of Kusama’s works sold at Christie’s for $NZ7.5 million, the highest price ever paid for a female artist.
Image: Top left, Kusama as sixties provocateur and right, Kusama 2009 posing with one of her spot-branded mobile phones. Below, the $NZ1,300 version of the three Kusama branded phone made in a spotty dog bag called Dots Obsession, Full Happiness with Dots for Japanese Telco KDDI. The other two Kusama models are priced at $NZ13,500 each.