Yayoi Kusama – a talent out of the ordinary

Yayoi Kusama, deemed one of the most influential living artists to come out of Japan, worked mainly with installations and conceptual art but has talents across a range of genre.

Born 22 March 1929 in Matsumo, Japan, she had an abusive mother who sent her to spy on her father’s illicit affairs which gave her a lifelong fear of sex. When she was 10 she started having vivid hallucinations – flashes of lights, dense fields of dots, flowers that spoke to her – which became a source of inspiration for her later, in a process she called ‘self-obliteration’ – and in one instance when she painted her mother the dots obliterated her as well. When she was 13 she was sent to work in a factory sewing parachutes for the war, in ‘enclosed darkness.’

In her late twenties she moved to the USA to gain freedom, was befriended by Georgia O’Keefe and became one of the leaders of the artistic avant garde movement. She organised ‘happenings’ in public parks involving nudity to protest the Vietnam War. In her forties she returned to Japan in ill health and began writing ‘shockingly visceral and surrealistic novels, short stories, and poetry.’ Then entered a mental asylum where she has been by choice ever since.

She is a maverick Sun Uranus in Aries on the focal point of a Cardinal T Square to Mars in Cancer opposition Saturn in Capricorn.  Certainly an innovator, rebel and drawn to anarchic expression, fueled by a cruel-treatment Mars Saturn. She’d spill over with initiative and restlessness, always driven to start new projects.  Her Moon is in flamboyant Leo perhaps conjunct Neptune and she has Jupiter Venus in earthy Taurus. Sculptors often have Taurus in their charts. Those Fixed signs would give her some grounding. But she has no Air signs to give her perspective on her life; and only one Mutable – Mercury in Pisces – so would find adaptability tricky.

Her ‘super-star’ 22^nd Harmonic is well-aspected, marking her out as special. As is her get-it-together and creative 5^th Harmonic; and her obsessive-dream 11H.

Thank you for this. What an interesting woman. It reminded me of a comment by Donald Kalsched in his book Trauma and Soul where he talks of trauma survivors being pushed, because their unbearable experiences, into a non-ordinary reality. Life drives some people mad and she turned her madness into art.