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拍品專文
Emerging from the earth in splendid majesty, Yayoi Kusama’s monumental Pumpkin attains spatial dominance, drawing all in its presence into the artist’s ever-expanding universe. One of the largest examples of the celebrated Japanese artist’s most famous subjects, Pumpkin embodies eight decades of meditative refinement of this autobiographical motif. Universally recognizable, the first large-scale pumpkin appeared as a permanent installation on Naoshima Island as part of the “Out of Bounds: Contemporary Art in the Seascape” exhibition in 1994. As such, Pumpkin joins the canon of contemporary sculpture, such as those by Jeff Koons, that has reinvigorated the genre for a new audience.
In the present work, an infinity of Kusama’s iconic black dots appear against the yellow backdrop, covering the entire variegated gourd. Large, weighty dots ascend each of the pumpkin’s ribs, articulating the organic shape, while further dots dwindle in scale as they recede into the pumpkin’s folds, ending as minute dashes barely visible from afar much as distant stars diminish into oblivion. Kusama’s palette is inspired by the typical Japanese kabocha, the type of pumpkin which she was first introduced to as a young child. The form has a deeply personal meaning to her—Kusama describes in her autobiography how in elementary school her grandfather took her to a seed-harvesting ground, where she “caught glimpses of the yellow flowers and baby fruit of pumpkin vines. I stopped to lean in for a closer look, and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head” (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, 2013, pg. 75). She goes on to describe how the pumpkin “immediately began speaking to me in the most animated manner. It was still moist with dew, indescribably appealing, and tender to the touch” (op. cit.). This first encounter with the pumpkin has ever since informed Kusama’s perception of both herself and the wider world.
Crowning the work is a slightly bowed peduncle relaying an inverse color arrangement from the body of the sculpture. This reversal draws the viewer’s eye to the very top of the sculpture, toward the space in which the boundless dots coalesce like a black hole, consuming all matter. In Japan, Kabocha are severed from their vines prior to attaining full maturity, left to ripen off the vine. This physical untethering of the fruit from the earth informs the sense of overpowering, endless expansion relayed by Pumpkin’s stem, both aspects together further accentuating Kusama’s oeuvre-defining practice of establishing an infinity of space to expose and protect against the underlying darkness she perceives through her hallucinosis.
As a teenage art student living in Kyoto, Kusama would meticulously execute Nihonga images of pumpkins of various sizes, one of which would win her a prize in an art competition. She was living at the mountainside home of a haiku poet, devoting large quantities of her time relentlessly painting these pumpkins. She describes how she would awake before dawn to work, sometimes sitting in Zen meditation before her pumpkin images: “When the sun came up over Mount Higashiyama, I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely upon the form before me. Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted having to take time to sleep.” (op. cit.). The pumpkin thus became a formative subject. Pervading her mind whilst occupying her brush, the pumpkin surrounded her entire universe: “Pumpkins talk to me” (Y. Kusama, quoted in Gilda Williams, “Infinite Nature: On Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkins,” in Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkins, Victoria Miro, 2014, n.p.).
Kusama’s obsession with pumpkins emerged from both endogenous and exogenous rationale. Her childhood home was surrounded with fields growing the fruit, providing life-saving sustenance to her and her family during the tribulations wrought by the Second World War. While the young Kusama consumed vast quantities of them for survival, pumpkins began to consume her inner thoughts, morphing into terrifying visuals in her early hallucinations. One such troubling vision saw her witnessing the kabocha fields around her home turn into an all-engulfing, speckled pattern which stretched across the world, threatening to swallow her whole. Pumpkin bears tribute to this terrifying ordeal as Kusama reenacts the overwhelming speckled dots over the face of her sculpture. This recreation becomes a healing therapy for the artist, permitting her to gain control over this trauma while simultaneously allowing her to share with the viewer the powerful full-body experience of being completely integrated into one’s surroundings.
Kusama left her obsessive Nihonga pumpkin paintings behind her when she immigrated to New York in 1957, and did not revisit the subject until she finally returned to Japan in the 1970s. Re-exposure to her homeland evidently rekindled her interest in the motif, which she pursued in both two and three dimensions. When selected in 1993 as the Japanese Pavilion’s first-ever solo artist for the 45th Venice Biennale, she made her centerpiece Mirror Room (Pumpkin), a peeping mirrored cube reflecting the dots covering the room; when viewers looked inside the box, pumpkins reflected repeatedly in the mirrored space. She conducted a performance where she distributed small pumpkins to the audience around the pavilion whilst dressed in a dotted dress and hat, blurring the boundaries between the work and her own self. The next year saw her inaugurate her first large-scale outdoor Pumpkin sculpture in Benesse Art Site Naoshima, where the work remains to this day.
A similar large version of the present work was exhibited this year on the grounds of Kensington Gardens as part of a prestigious show at the Serpentine Gallery, befitting this work’s continued significance on the contemporary zeitgeist. Kusama has made a singular impact on the course of art history—anticipating and pre-empting moments from Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptural works, to Louise Bourgeois’s phallic sculpture, to Andy Warhol’s repetitions and Damien Hirst’s dot obsession. Pumpkin marks the fullest exegesis of Kusama’s internal universe, its distillation of decades of meditative thought and practice surrounding the pumpkin motif visualized in its grand presence and remarkable expansiveness which sweeps the viewer up into the artist’s vision.
In the present work, an infinity of Kusama’s iconic black dots appear against the yellow backdrop, covering the entire variegated gourd. Large, weighty dots ascend each of the pumpkin’s ribs, articulating the organic shape, while further dots dwindle in scale as they recede into the pumpkin’s folds, ending as minute dashes barely visible from afar much as distant stars diminish into oblivion. Kusama’s palette is inspired by the typical Japanese kabocha, the type of pumpkin which she was first introduced to as a young child. The form has a deeply personal meaning to her—Kusama describes in her autobiography how in elementary school her grandfather took her to a seed-harvesting ground, where she “caught glimpses of the yellow flowers and baby fruit of pumpkin vines. I stopped to lean in for a closer look, and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head” (Y. Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, 2013, pg. 75). She goes on to describe how the pumpkin “immediately began speaking to me in the most animated manner. It was still moist with dew, indescribably appealing, and tender to the touch” (op. cit.). This first encounter with the pumpkin has ever since informed Kusama’s perception of both herself and the wider world.
Crowning the work is a slightly bowed peduncle relaying an inverse color arrangement from the body of the sculpture. This reversal draws the viewer’s eye to the very top of the sculpture, toward the space in which the boundless dots coalesce like a black hole, consuming all matter. In Japan, Kabocha are severed from their vines prior to attaining full maturity, left to ripen off the vine. This physical untethering of the fruit from the earth informs the sense of overpowering, endless expansion relayed by Pumpkin’s stem, both aspects together further accentuating Kusama’s oeuvre-defining practice of establishing an infinity of space to expose and protect against the underlying darkness she perceives through her hallucinosis.
As a teenage art student living in Kyoto, Kusama would meticulously execute Nihonga images of pumpkins of various sizes, one of which would win her a prize in an art competition. She was living at the mountainside home of a haiku poet, devoting large quantities of her time relentlessly painting these pumpkins. She describes how she would awake before dawn to work, sometimes sitting in Zen meditation before her pumpkin images: “When the sun came up over Mount Higashiyama, I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely upon the form before me. Just as Bodhidharma spent ten years facing a stone wall, I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin. I regretted having to take time to sleep.” (op. cit.). The pumpkin thus became a formative subject. Pervading her mind whilst occupying her brush, the pumpkin surrounded her entire universe: “Pumpkins talk to me” (Y. Kusama, quoted in Gilda Williams, “Infinite Nature: On Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkins,” in Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkins, Victoria Miro, 2014, n.p.).
Kusama’s obsession with pumpkins emerged from both endogenous and exogenous rationale. Her childhood home was surrounded with fields growing the fruit, providing life-saving sustenance to her and her family during the tribulations wrought by the Second World War. While the young Kusama consumed vast quantities of them for survival, pumpkins began to consume her inner thoughts, morphing into terrifying visuals in her early hallucinations. One such troubling vision saw her witnessing the kabocha fields around her home turn into an all-engulfing, speckled pattern which stretched across the world, threatening to swallow her whole. Pumpkin bears tribute to this terrifying ordeal as Kusama reenacts the overwhelming speckled dots over the face of her sculpture. This recreation becomes a healing therapy for the artist, permitting her to gain control over this trauma while simultaneously allowing her to share with the viewer the powerful full-body experience of being completely integrated into one’s surroundings.
Kusama left her obsessive Nihonga pumpkin paintings behind her when she immigrated to New York in 1957, and did not revisit the subject until she finally returned to Japan in the 1970s. Re-exposure to her homeland evidently rekindled her interest in the motif, which she pursued in both two and three dimensions. When selected in 1993 as the Japanese Pavilion’s first-ever solo artist for the 45th Venice Biennale, she made her centerpiece Mirror Room (Pumpkin), a peeping mirrored cube reflecting the dots covering the room; when viewers looked inside the box, pumpkins reflected repeatedly in the mirrored space. She conducted a performance where she distributed small pumpkins to the audience around the pavilion whilst dressed in a dotted dress and hat, blurring the boundaries between the work and her own self. The next year saw her inaugurate her first large-scale outdoor Pumpkin sculpture in Benesse Art Site Naoshima, where the work remains to this day.
A similar large version of the present work was exhibited this year on the grounds of Kensington Gardens as part of a prestigious show at the Serpentine Gallery, befitting this work’s continued significance on the contemporary zeitgeist. Kusama has made a singular impact on the course of art history—anticipating and pre-empting moments from Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptural works, to Louise Bourgeois’s phallic sculpture, to Andy Warhol’s repetitions and Damien Hirst’s dot obsession. Pumpkin marks the fullest exegesis of Kusama’s internal universe, its distillation of decades of meditative thought and practice surrounding the pumpkin motif visualized in its grand presence and remarkable expansiveness which sweeps the viewer up into the artist’s vision.