TOKYO – The 5-story museum devoted to the work of Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama will open its doors on October 1 in Tokyo. Established by Kusama and managed by the Yayoi Kusama Foundation, the museum’s purpose is to familiarize the public with contemporary art through exhibitions of Kusama’s eye-opening polka-dot-theme artworks and installations.
A museum statement added that it is the foundation’s desire to “transmit the message of world peace and human love, which Kusama has been embodying through her artworks” and host semiannual exhibitions and lectures.
The inaugural exhibition, titled “Creation if a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art,” will run from October 1 through Feb. 25, 2018. It will feature Kusama’s latest painting series “My Eternal Soul.”
The reinforced-concrete museum is located at 107 Bentencho in Tokyo’s Shinjuku-ku ward. It is constructed with five stories above ground and one story below. Visitors enter on the first floor, which also houses a gift shop. Exhibition rooms are on the second and third floors, while the fourth floor is dedicated to installations. The fifth floor contains a browsing library and also has an outdoor exhibition space.
Hours of operation will be 11 a.m. till 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays, and on national holidays, but the museum may be closed for maintenance between exhibitions as well as during the New Year holiday.
About Yayoi Kusama:
Artist and novelist Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture. From a young age, Yayoi Kusama experienced visual and auditory hallucinations, and began creating net and polka-dot-pattern pictures. In 1957, she went to the United States and began making net paintings and soft sculptures, and developing installations that made use of mirrors, lights and “happenings,” thus establishing herself as an avant-garde artist. She discovered an artistic philosophy of self-annihilation via the obsessive repetition and multiplication of single motifs. She has held exhibitions at various museums throughout the world, and in recent years her large-scale retrospective exhibitions at the likes of Tate Modern and Pompidou Center have attracted global attention. More than 2 million visitors attended her exhibition tours in Latin America and Asia. She was named the “world’s most popular artist in 2014” by The Art Newspaper. In 2016, she was awarded Japan’s Order of Culture. In 2017, her North American tour was launched at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
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