Yayoi Kusama’s lifelong search for truth, honesty and meaning

A 15-year odyssey brings an elusive and enigmatic artist to the world.

Filmmaker Heather Lenz with contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama, a few months shy of 90 years old, is a contemporary artist who finally has come into her own, embraced by galleries, curators, the art market and the public, acclaimed as the world’s most popular artist.

For Heather Lenz, director of the documentary Kusama: Infinity, this recognition is ridiculously overdue. Lenz began work on the film almost 15 years ago and was shocked by the resistance she met.

“I even had someone question why I would want to make a film about a ‘foreign female’ and that just made my jaw drop,” she says.

“She wasn’t a superstar yet but her star was rising, and I thought she had made incredible art and she had an amazing story.”

Kusama: Infinity shows us the vivid, large-scale installation work of recent years that has made the artist an international celebrity and a favourite among gallery­goers with Instagram accounts.

With archival footage, images of the work and interviews with colleagues, curators and the artist, it also sketches a fascinating trajectory: a spirit of rebellion, a constant engagement with artistic movements and ideas, a fertile originality and a struggle to find her place and to be taken seriously.

The artist in a scene from Kusama: Infinity.

Kusama was born in 1929, in Matsumoto, Nagano, to a well-off family who made their money from plant nurseries.

She had a troubled childhood, growing up in the shadow of her parents’ fractured marriage. Her mother actively discouraged her from painting and tried to force her into an arranged marriage.

World War II had a significant impact on her. She experienced hallucinatory episodes from a young age that seem to have fed and nourished her art.

She saw herself as an artist from her earliest years and looked abroad for influences. She wrote to American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe, sending some of her watercolours, and received an encouraging reply.

In 1958, aged 27, she took herself to New York: she felt Japanese society was too conservative and hostile to female artists. However, New York wasn’t all she expected.

“She doesn’t want to get married and have kids; she goes to America and expects to find freedom, and has a new set of obstacles to overcome,” Lenz says.

Kusama: Infinity shows her stubborn determination and her inventive, evolving body of work that included painting, drawing sculpture, collage installations and happenings, with recurring motifs and unpredictable innovations. She found supporters and admirers. Yet — as a Japanese artist and a female artist — she was marginalised and frustrated.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, a decision that introduced different pressure. She was treated as a scandalous figure in her home town. Four years later she checked into a psychiatric institution and has been a resident since. She has a studio nearby, and this is where she goes every day. The institution, Lenz says, “has allowed her to focus on making art. She’s been given the support to pursue that.”

Lenz came across Kusama’s work in the early 1990s when she was an art history student. At that time, a single catalogue was the only publication about Kusama in the US. She studied film, began pitching a documentary about Kusama, started work on it in 2004, struggling to find funding.

“If there was a silver lining about not being able to get funding it was that over time we uncovered more and more material and images that we were able to include to tell the story,” she says.

“I never could have imagined that she would have become so popular during the making of this film. I was happy for her, but in some ways it presented even more challenges than we already had.

“Already it involved international travel and translators, and as she became more and more successful and her work was showing around the world, of course I wanted to go and film a lot of these events. But we couldn’t get the fin­ancing and resources to film everything we wanted.”

Things changed for Lenz personally in the course of making the film: “During that time I married into a Japanese family and began to have a better understanding of Japanese culture, and I think that was very helpful.”

It also helped her understand the significance of World War II for Kusama and her family.

“My husband’s grandfather was killed when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and I had the opportunity to see a family that has dealt with this kind of loss and trauma, and it helped me understand Kusama better,” she says.

“One of her favourite things to talk about was a message for world peace. I thought her contributions to the American art world hadn’t been properly understood and part of that, I think, was the anti-war happenings in the 1960s,” something Kusama understood in a very particular way.

“When journalists wrote about them at the time it was very sensationalist and superficial.

“As time passed and I struggled to get funding I became more and more aware of her tenacity and the obstacles she had to overcome and I started to relate in some ways to that part of the story more.

“She’s tenacious, standing up for herself. She thinks her work is as good as the work of these men, she’s not content to be second fiddle, she wants her work featured prominently, and she had to have that strong belief in herself.”

Despite all the obstacles Kusama faced, she remained creative.

“I don’t think there was ever a long period when she wasn’t making art,” Lenz says.

“The nature of the art or the resources she had available changed over time.

“These days she’s very successful and she can pretty much afford to make anything she dreams up. She can make large-scale installations and things like that.

“But when she didn’t have a lot of resources she made collages with magazines and scissors and glue and ink. Simple and inexpensive, but she’s able to transform them into extraordinary art.”

These collages, made in the early 70s, are not well known, Lenz says, but they among her favourite Kusama works.

It was some time into the project, Lenz says, before she managed to organise a meeting with the artist and interview her: “It was very, very exciting. I got the opportunity to ask her questions at time when there wasn’t a ton written about her.”

And it wasn’t a matter of capturing a subject reminiscing about the past: she also saw an artist in action: “It was exciting to see where she got to work, to see her make some art — the very first time we met with her we were able to film that.”

Lenz was received with the utmost warmth: “I told her it was the happiest day of my life and she said, ‘Mine too.’ ”

Kusama: Infinity is screening at selected cinemas.