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Lot Essay
Yayoi Kusama’s Japanese Radishes (1981) is a paean to the natural world. The arresting monochrome depicts a series of Japanese radishes, or daikon, a distinctive subject within the artist’s rich oeuvre. Kusama has painted the three elongated vegetables against a tessellating black-and-white ground, and their bushy leaves and solarised forms—adorned with a deftly executed polka dot pattern—seem to simultaneously sink into and arise from the wavy, heady pattern. Both the dots and the infinity-net backdrop emerged from the hallucinations Kusama first experienced as a child and which have come to define her practice.
Kusama has long been fascinated by the organic world. She was born in Matsumoto, Japan, a city nestled in the Japanese Alps where the ‘sun hides itself early in the evening beyond the mountains’ (Y. Kusama, ‘The Struggle and Wanderings of My Soul (extracts)’, 1975, reprinted in L. Hoptman et. al., Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 121). Growing up, Kusama passed much of her time at the plant nursery that her parents owned and operated. While out one afternoon with her grandfather, she found herself captivated by the solid, round pumpkins they came across during their walk, later making the protuberant vegetable a central—and now iconic—motif of her practice. Although Kusama has become indelibly linked to the pumpkin, she has, over the course of her long career, depicted other floral and vegetal motifs. Her earliest sketchbooks are filled with meticulous drawings of plants and flowers, and one of Kusama’s first paintings was a naturalistic still life of three onions, created while she was studying Nihonga, the neo-traditional Japanese style of painting, at the Arts and Crafts School in Kyoto.
Japanese Radishes was painted in 1981, eight years after Kusama moved back to Japan after almost fifteen spent in New York City; her choice to paint a vegetable native to her homeland seems a fitting announcement—however belated—of her return. This move was precipitated by her declining health, and in 1977, the artist decided to relocate permanently to a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, a change which ushered in a fruitful period of artistic production during which Kusama not only painted but also wrote novels and poetry in various genres. Although Kusama was then still relatively unknown in Japan, her work was included in exhibitions at the National Museum of International Art, Osaka, and the National Museums of Modern Art in Kyoto and Tokyo. In 1982, the Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, presented a new body of work by the artist.
Japanese Radishes invokes the lessons Kusama had absorbed while living in New York, namely the ‘all over’ gestures of her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries and Pop art’s deadpan depictions of objects. The work filters these ideas through her own, decidedly personal practice and speaks to Kusama’s re-emergence within Japanese culture. Its crisp linearity underscores the graphic intensity of Kusama’s art, and with its ‘flat, psychedelic’ feel, repetitive motif, and allusion to ‘vibrant organic life’, the painting is characteristic of the works of this period (A. Tatehata, ‘New Paintings’, in L. Neri and T. Goto (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, New York 2021, p. 48). Despite the intense, almost space-age sense that imbues the work, it is inextricably tied to the earth, its land and vegetation, its seasons and cycles. The painting, in short, evokes an organic equilibrium.
Kusama has long been fascinated by the organic world. She was born in Matsumoto, Japan, a city nestled in the Japanese Alps where the ‘sun hides itself early in the evening beyond the mountains’ (Y. Kusama, ‘The Struggle and Wanderings of My Soul (extracts)’, 1975, reprinted in L. Hoptman et. al., Yayoi Kusama, London 2000, p. 121). Growing up, Kusama passed much of her time at the plant nursery that her parents owned and operated. While out one afternoon with her grandfather, she found herself captivated by the solid, round pumpkins they came across during their walk, later making the protuberant vegetable a central—and now iconic—motif of her practice. Although Kusama has become indelibly linked to the pumpkin, she has, over the course of her long career, depicted other floral and vegetal motifs. Her earliest sketchbooks are filled with meticulous drawings of plants and flowers, and one of Kusama’s first paintings was a naturalistic still life of three onions, created while she was studying Nihonga, the neo-traditional Japanese style of painting, at the Arts and Crafts School in Kyoto.
Japanese Radishes was painted in 1981, eight years after Kusama moved back to Japan after almost fifteen spent in New York City; her choice to paint a vegetable native to her homeland seems a fitting announcement—however belated—of her return. This move was precipitated by her declining health, and in 1977, the artist decided to relocate permanently to a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, a change which ushered in a fruitful period of artistic production during which Kusama not only painted but also wrote novels and poetry in various genres. Although Kusama was then still relatively unknown in Japan, her work was included in exhibitions at the National Museum of International Art, Osaka, and the National Museums of Modern Art in Kyoto and Tokyo. In 1982, the Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, presented a new body of work by the artist.
Japanese Radishes invokes the lessons Kusama had absorbed while living in New York, namely the ‘all over’ gestures of her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries and Pop art’s deadpan depictions of objects. The work filters these ideas through her own, decidedly personal practice and speaks to Kusama’s re-emergence within Japanese culture. Its crisp linearity underscores the graphic intensity of Kusama’s art, and with its ‘flat, psychedelic’ feel, repetitive motif, and allusion to ‘vibrant organic life’, the painting is characteristic of the works of this period (A. Tatehata, ‘New Paintings’, in L. Neri and T. Goto (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, New York 2021, p. 48). Despite the intense, almost space-age sense that imbues the work, it is inextricably tied to the earth, its land and vegetation, its seasons and cycles. The painting, in short, evokes an organic equilibrium.