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Yayoi Kusama , Fireflies on the Water, 2002.
Mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights, and water, 115 x 144 x 144 in. (292.1 x 365.8 x 365.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Postwar Committee and the Contemporary Committee and partial gift of Betsy Wittenborn Miller 2003.322. ©Yayoi Kusama. Photo by Adam Reich.

Photograph by Yoko Kawasaki, courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery.

Recent Acquisition

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan), Fireflies on the Water (2002)

Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama has used painting, performance, sculpture, and installation to develop a highly personal formal vocabulary that combines repetitive elements such as net and dot patterns with organic and often eroticized sculptural forms. Her early paintings and collages extend the language of Abstract Expressionism and its concern for allover compositions into an intimate form of gridded space. No. White A.Z (1958-59) is a large, monochrome painting consisting of white net patterning across a slightly darker background. In Airmail Stickers (1962) adhesive postal stickers, tightly stacked side by side, are collaged across the entire expanse of the canvas.

By the early 1960s, Kusama had begun to produce her Accumulations—everyday objects such as chairs, tables, and clothes densely covered with hand-sewn, phallic protrusions In Accumulation No. 2 (1962) Kusama covered a sofa entirely with white phallic forms, endowing it with an organic appearance and an air of obsessive anxiety. In Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1964) a full-size rowboat is adorned with hundreds of such protrusions, all painted a monochrome white. Around the same time, Kusama began to paint net and dot patterns onto household items, and in 1965 she combined all these elements in the installation Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (or Floor Show). In Infinity Mirror Room a dense field of polka-dotted phallic protrusions extended from the floor of an enclosed space. The walls of the environment were lined with mirrors, leaving only a small passageway into the center of the installation empty. For the installation Kusama's Peep Show (1966), the artist constructed a room whose walls and ceiling were covered with mirrors, while the floor was densely filled with glowing electric lightbulbs in different colors. Two small windows allowed the viewer and Kusama to peer inside. Continuing her obsessive, almost psychedelic approach, the installations suggest a kaleidoscopic mode of perception, in which interior rooms contain unbound, seemingly endless spaces. By the late 1960s Kusama began to stage performances, sometimes covering her naked body, or others' bodies, with patterns.

In the early 1970s, Kusama returned to Tokyo; she voluntarily entered a clinic for the mentally ill, where she has remained ever since. She has continued to produce work at a prolific rate, remarkable in its consistency. Her obsessive arrangements, her often radically eroticized alterations of everyday objects, her fascination with infinity, and the all-encompassing nature of her work have remained at the core of her production.

In her most recent works Kusama continues to create reflective interior environments. Fireflies on the Water (2002) consists of a small room lined with mirrors on all sides, a pool in the center of the space, and 150 small lights hanging from the ceiling, creating a dazzling effect of direct and reflected light, emanating from both the mirrors and the water's surface. Like her earliest room-size installation, Fireflies embodies an almost hallucinatory approach to reality, while shifting the mood from her earlier, more unsettling installations toward a more ethereal, almost spiritual experience.

This text is excerpted from the Whitney Biennial 2004 Exhibition catalogue.