Yayoi Kusama
Born in Nagano Prefecture.
Avant-garde Sculptor, painter and novelist.
[quote]Started to paint using polka dots and nets as motifs at around age ten ,and created fantastic paintings in watercolors, pastels and oils.
Went to the United States in 1957. Showed large paintings, soft sculptures, and environmental sculptures using mirrors and electric lights. In the latter 1960s, staged many happenings such as body painting festivals, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations. Launched media-related activities such as film production and newspaper publication. In 1968, the film “Kusama’s Self-Obliteration” which Kusama produced and starred in won a prize at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium and the second prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Held exhibitions and staged happenings also in various countries in Europe.
Returned to Japan in 1973. While continuing to produce and show art works, Kusama issued a number of novels and anthologies. In 1983, the novel “The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street” won the Tenth Literary Award for New Writers from the monthly magazine Yasei Jidai.
In 1986, held solo exhibitions at the Musee Municipal, Dole and the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Calais, France, in 1989, solo exhibitions at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England. In 1993, participated in the 45th Venice Biennale.
Began to create open-air sculptures in 1994. Produced open-air pieces for the Fukuoka Kenko Center, the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art, the Bunka-mura on Benesse Island of Naoshima, Kirishima Open-Air Museum and Matsumoto City Museum of Art, and a mural for the hallway at subway station in Lisbon.
Began to show works mainly at galleries in New York in 1996. A solo show held in New York in the same year won the Best Art Gallery Show’s first place from International Association of Art Critics.
From1998 to 1999, a major retrospective of Kusama’s works which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
In 2000, Kusama won The Education Minister’s Art Encouragement Prize and Foreign-Minister’s Commendations. Her solo exhibition that started at Le Consortium in France in the same year traveled to Maison de la culture du Japon, Paris, KUNSTHALLEN BRANDTS ÆDEFABRIK, Denmark, Le Abattoirs, Toulouse, KUNSTHALLE Wien, Art Sonje Center, Seoul.
Received the Asahi Prize in 2001.
Received Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2003
Kusama participates in various activities in other than art, such as photographic collaboration with photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, an appearance in the film “Topaz” written and directed by writer Ryu Murakami, and collaboration with musician Peter Gabriel and fashion designer Issey Miyake.[/quote]
[quote]Photography and editing: Jud Yalkut. Scenario: Yayoi Kusama and Jud Yalkut. Art Direction: Yayoi Kusama. Music: The C.I.A. Change (Citizens for Interplanetary Activity) with Paul Kilb, piano; Ted Berk: chanting and words; Sound production: Win Hardy. Sound Engineer: Matt Hoffman, Apostolic Studios, New York.. With Yayoi Kusama, Joe Jones, Don Snyder, and others.
A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration.
"The obsessive act of covering (destruction of boundaries-identities) gradually equivalent to the ritual of uncovering (Striping away of ego); individual self, destroyed in mask/parody/clustering, is transcended. Mandalic (magic circle meditational form used to concentrate attention to a spiraling in/to a point through which new, expanded awareness is possible. The techniques of superimposition, a mere gimmick in most films, is an apt formal analogue for the dissolution of discreteness, for the meshing-merging of identities in the last orgiastic section of SELF-OBLIERATION -- we are confronted with an atomistic collection of figures interacting but one emergent, undulating Meat-Cloud-Being." -- Paul Sharits.
"A mysteriously innocent film." -- P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture.
"Yayoi Kusama, a crazy Japanese chick, puts dots on the whole world. Dots move in psychedelia which moves into orgy. Smooth transition." -- Robert Nelson, Canyon Cinemanews.
Prizewinner: Fourth International Experimental Film Competition, Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium, 1968. Second Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, 1968. Selected for the Second Maryland Film Festival; the "Steps Towards a New Consciousness" program at the Whitney Museum of American Art's New American Filmmaker Series; and the collections of the New York State Council on the Arts and the Royal Film Archives of Belgium. Special Mention, the First Annual Berkeley Experimental Film Festival, for "Transcendence of the film plane in the first third of the film."
http://www.film-makerscoop.com/catalog/y.html
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Video: XviD at 1482kb/s 560 x 416
Audio: 0x0055(MP3, ISO) MPEG-1 Layer 3 48000Hz 206 kb/s total (2 chnls)
Lenght: 00:23:31
Kusama's.Self.Obliteration.(Yayoi.Kusama)-fitz.avi 
