Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama grew up with parents who didn’t support her love of drawing. Despite this, she went on to study art in Kyoto and would go on to revolutionize New York’s male-dominated art scene and become an Instagram sensation. Yayoi works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry and fiction. Her work is based in conceptual art and involves some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She’s been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan. We featured Yayoi as part of our “Yes, but why?” series: a project by WePresent and Tate galleries to explain what makes some of the world’s best artists so brilliant.
