Polka Dot Superstar: The Amazing World Of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is Japan’s most successful living artist. The 85 year old is famed for her colourful polka dot covered artworks but the origins of these bright hues lie in a much darker place.

Kusama’s inspiration for her use of repetitive patterns comes from the hallucinations she has suffered since early childhood. Kusama has lived in a psychiatric hospital for nearly 40 years, fighting the daily urge to commit suicide through painting. Her childhood hallucinations combined with a philandering father and a domineering mother left the young Kusama vulnerable, with only her art as armour for survival.

Her unwavering compulsion to create colourful and sometimes unsettling work took her from the traditional art world of post-war Japan to the 1950/60s avant-garde New York scene. But after initially impressing the art royalty of Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell, she shocked the press with her naked free love 'Happenings', fell out of favour and returned to Japan.

This film follows Kusama during the preparations for Tate Modern’s 2012 retrospective of her work, when she undertook the mammoth physical and mental challenge of creating 100 new works for the largest ever exhibition of her art, working in her purpose built studio near the hospital.

With her work back in the public eye, we follow Kusama as she becomes the face of a lucrative polka dot collaboration with Luis Vuitton and returns to New York to be embraced by an art world that rejected her 50 years before.

Publicity contact: SH6