Yayoi Kusama: The Moles of Peace

We are what we do with what happens to us. The celebrated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama grew up among her family's nurseries in Matsumoto, Japan . She used to take a notebook there to draw seeds and plants. Until one day in 1939, when she was 10 years old, she looked up and hallucinated: "All the violets were talking to me."

What was Yayoi Kusama running away from with talking flowers?

A traditional provincial family in a semi-feudal country, an ally of the Nazis during World War II. A mother who forced her to spy on her father's sexual encounters with geishas and report them to her, only to be punished later . "A piece of garbage," she called it. More abuse . Pain.

However, since then, Yayoi Kusama has transformed her hallucinations into reality, and her reality into her hallucinations. She created The Infinite Web , as she calls her globally acclaimed (and highly sought-after) work and the title of her autobiography .

Why an infinite network? Yayoi Kusama compulsively produced series and patterns, both inside and outside the frames. Polka dots on naked bodies, giant pumpkins , mirrored halls, fabric "phallus fields." Even designs for top brands . Cheerful , generally pop-inspired refuges for the fantasy that saves her.

There is another piece of his, less popular and strident, that sums up this idea in another beautiful way: a closed box that is exposed in the dark so that little lights shine, like stars.

Something like a galaxy of its own, to gaze at leisurely, as one wanders through Japanese temples, attentive to the cold stone and the shadows of the trees, among the paper lanterns.

By Yayoi Kusama is struck by at least two other things. One, her lucidity from hell. After hearing the violets speak, she knew she would be "unable to decide if it had really happened or if it had just been some kind of dream."

She used her illness to create, but she never romanticized it . On the contrary, she acknowledged it and tried to overcome it. In fact, after fleeing Japan to the United States in 1958 (following the nuclear bombings) and associating with the painter Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol , she returned to her native country in 1973, feeling ill, and decided to live in a psychiatric hospital. In March, she turned 96 there, where she began writing poems.

A major Yayoi exhibition is currently being prepared in Basel , Switzerland. Many will remember the one exhibited at Malba in 2013. Canadian Philip Larratt-Smith, then deputy chief curator of the museum, explained: “Each of Yayoi Kusama's mole is a face in the cosmos and expresses, for her, a desire for peace.”

This raises one more question (perhaps the list of questions is as endless as her web). She also pointed it out: “If, in the midst of this society awash in lies and madness, you have managed to come even one step closer to the awesome splendor of your own life, the mark you will leave behind is that of someone who has truly lived as a human being.”