Photography: @jepasto
Tokyo’s new Yayoi Kusama Museum officially threw open its doors this weekend, and the polka dot-covered building is as Instagramable as you’d expect.
Kusama’s signature pattern has been applied to museum’s enormous curved windows, giving a taste of things to come inside the five-storey structure. Practice Kume Sekkei conceived the building in 2014 as a stack of pristine white volumes, offering a blank backdrop for Yayoi Kusama’s work.
But don’t be fooled – colour lurks around every corner, including inside polka-dot-filled elevators.
Exhibition Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art, inaugurates the Yayoi Kusama Museum and features mostly recent works. Kusama’s black and white silkscreen prints line the walls of the second floor, but it’s a more colourful affair a level above where visitors will find 45 of her more recent acrylic paintings – over a third of which are from her series ‘My Eternal Soul’.
Also taking up residence is giant sculpture, ‘Starry Pumpkin (2015)’. It’s been installed on the gallery’s rooftop, overlooking the Shinjuku neighbourhood, which is home to Yayoi Kusama’s studio and the psychiatric hospital where she’s lived since 1977.
Fans of her mirrored rooms will get a thrill from her installation of ‘Pumpkins screaming about love beyond infinity’, which fills the fourth floor of the Yayoi Kusama Museum with rows of the glowing yellow and black vegetable.
Exhibitions will be rotated every six months, and tickets to visit the exhibition have already sold out beyond November.
Said Yayoi Kusama at the press preview: ’I hope that you will continue to understand my spirit and that this is for the benefit of world peace and love’.
Amen to that.
