Yayoi Kusama

★The Most Comprehensive Retrospective on Yayoi Kusama★

☆Spanning an 80-year career, featuring nearly 200 representative artworks in color☆

Owning this book is like having a Yayoi Kusama museum always open to you.

"Time has finally cast a benevolent gaze upon me. But this no longer matters, for I am running towards the future."

——Yayoi Kusama

　　What is your impression of Yayoi Kusama?

　　Is it the pumpkins and endless polka dots in her works? Is it the avant-garde queen with a wild and uninhibited style? Or is it the diligent artist who tirelessly hand-draws repetitive patterns?

　　Open this book, and you will step into Yayoi Kusama's world:

　　The "Interview" features a dialogue between Kusama and Akira Tatehata, director of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, where Kusama recounts how childhood trauma and hallucinatory experiences led her to art, and her challenging artistic life in New York in her early years. The "Overview" is a special essay by art historian Laura Hoptman, covering 20,000 words, reviewing Kusama's creative trajectory from the 1950s to the 1990s. It traces Kusama's major life events, such as her move to New York and her return to Japan, alongside pivotal works and happenings like the "Infinity Nets" and "Accumulation" series, "Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show," "Kusama's Peep Show," "Narcissus Garden," and "Anatomic Explosion," analyzing Kusama's creative motivations and presenting the evolution of her artistic style and concerns across different periods.

The "Focus" section provides a brief highlight on Kusama's environmental artwork "Impression of Oppression," exhibited in Germany in 1966. This piece served as her breakthrough work, bringing her into the public eye in Europe and marking a significant achievement in environmental art. The "Poetry Selection" features six works by Kusama's favorite Japanese poet, Takuboku Ishikawa, offering insight into the mutual reflection of their creative minds. "Writings" includes Kusama's literary works, rarely seen in Taiwan, comprising 5 novel excerpts, 23 poems, and 7 happening press releases, allowing readers to explore different facets of Kusama. "Addenda" is another lengthy essay, updating Kusama's artistic creations since the 21st century and another shift in her style.

The "Appendix" after the main text includes over 500 bibliographical entries related to Kusama, such as monographs, interviews, and research topics, a list of museums collecting Kusama's works, and an index of all artworks in the book. Most importantly, it contains a complete chronology of Yayoi Kusama, detailing the creation year and exhibition locations of over 400 of her works, providing a comprehensive overview of her creative journey.

　　Ultimately, closing this book, you will find that all of these are Yayoi Kusama—and perhaps none of them are, because she never wished to be defined or labeled; perhaps she is still the little girl who first saw hallucinations, wanting only to escape everything before her. And in this process of continuous creation, continuous escape, and return, she has long built a space for herself where she can forget her physical body and shed worldly bonds; she is like sailing on a beautiful small boat, slowly moving towards eternity, and we are merely fortunate to stand on the shore, catching a fleeting glimpse.

"The self-revolution I pursue to survive is actually a means to death.

I am now at a stage where I create art for the peace of my soul, and I embrace it all."

　　This book features nearly 200 representative works by Yayoi Kusama, encompassing various forms of expression such as sculpture, collage, paintings, happenings, environmental art, installation art, and fashion design. However, this book is not merely a collection of works or a catalog. Through profiles and dialogues with art historians, critics, and artists, readers can gain a comprehensive overview of Yayoi Kusama's almost eighty-year creative career, from her motivations, processes, styles, and techniques to how Kusama repeatedly astonished the world, becoming the global Kusama. It includes both the clear and reasoned discourse from a third-person perspective and genuine emotional expressions from Kusama's first-person account. What is even more valuable is that the book also includes Kusama's literary works, rarely seen in the Taiwanese publishing market, such as new poetry, novels, and happening press releases. With text and images referencing each other, Kusama's inner world becomes more three-dimensional—thus, the ambition of this book is self-evident: everything you know and don't know about Yayoi Kusama is here.