Yayoi Kusama, Chii-chan, 2004

09 January 2025

Performance, installation, painting, sculpture; pop, abstraction, figuration, conceptualism: in her seven-decade career, Yayoi Kusama has traversed mediums and styles with a rarely seen agility. To this day, she refuses to be consigned to a singular category, preferring to refer to her work simply as “Kusama art”. Her current solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia represents the diverse gamut of her work, ranging from paintings to interactive installations.

Kusama is a daring outlier within an art historical canon that tends to favour the artists whose work is neatly defined and easy to understand. She has communed and conversed with important figures from the most important movements of the 20th century — from Georgia O’Keeffe, who wrote a letter encouraging her 1957 move from Japan to New York to join the likes of Andy Warhol, who later became a good friend and artistic interlocutor. However, unlike these artists, Kusama’s oeuvre is marked by a studied refusal to settle into a particular style or way of working.

Chii-chan was executed in 2004 as part of a series of figurative sculptures, each of their names suffixed with -chan (ちゃん), a Japanese term of endearment often used for children or pets. Standing tall, they are covered head to toe in a variety of colourful patterns. Save for her dress, which bares a semi-geometric pattern, Chii-chan is a polka-dot woman. Her shoes, hair, hat and skin are dotted with bright, contrasting colours. Even her eyes and mouth have been reduced to their most simple geometric form: three black spots adorning her face.

The polka dot is the leitmotif of Kusama art — a pattern that the artist has deployed repeatedly since the very beginning. Her work is deeply bound up with her personal experiences, which themselves might be understood as aligning with a unique kind of esoteric spirituality. Her interest in polka dots, the story goes, was born of a hallucination that she experienced as a child, wherein the pattern of a tablecloth began to multiply itself across her field of vision, covering the walls and stretching above her to infinity.

This experience of the infinite has guided Kusama’s practice, which can be viewed as a series of attempts to recapture it — which explains her constant return to the polka dot. As the artist herself put it, “polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment.”^[1]

The word “obliteration” has become synonymous with Kusama’s various experiments in infinity; artworks that seek to subsume their subjects — and, occasionally, the world itself — within a spotted cosmos of her making. Aside from her famous Infinity Rooms and spotted paintings, a notable example of this is her Narcissus Garden (1966), a performance-cum-installation first staged during the 33rd Venice Biennale, that involves the artist obliterating a given physical space by filling it with stainless steel balls. A later, interactive example can be found at her National Gallery of Victoria exhibition. The Obliteration Room, first staged in 2002 and since displayed at venues around the world including the Tate Modern in London and the Cleveland Museum of Art, is a completely white room that viewers are invited to cover in circular stickers, making them partners in Kusama’s spiritual and artistic mission.

Kusama began experimenting with sculpture in 1963, covering items of furniture in bulbous fabric forms. Executed forty years later, Chii-chan is simply another step on the same journey. We see a childlike figure — perhaps a reference to a young Kusama, shortly after her revelatory polka dot experience — mid-obliteration. As her body is subsumed by the round forms, she finds herself coming closer to the infinite realm that Kusama made it her life’s work to represent.