Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, National Gallery Singapore
I decided to take Teddy to the National Gallery Singapore to experience Yayoi Kusama’s beautiful exhibit, Life is the Heart of a Rainbow. Teds doesn’t often focus as the main star of my blog posts, mainly because I believe a lot of the activities we do are more geared towards Alfie’s age and often outside in 90 degree weather, which is too much for the little pudge.
All four colorful walls and the freedom to crawl.
Yet, I had to take the opportunity to bring him, as I knew he would enjoy it from a purely visual sense as this was my second time seeing her works, the first being at a similar collaboration held in Shanghai. Yayoi’s magnificent use of contrasting and bright colors in a seemingly friendly barrage of polka dots was the perfect opportunity for baby visual stimulation.
From a child’s perspective, Kusama’s works may seem vibrant and fun, but there is a strong tone of sexuality and an outcry against societal structures that form the very crux of her use of “dots” that I couldn’t help feel are ironically treated by modern day society, particularly social media, in an ever increasing commercial way. Wasn’t this the polar opposite of her entire stance?
Maybe artists evolve and their thinking behind their works do as well, but Kusama, to me, is one of the most fascinating artists in her sheer persistence of subject and form. I would never have been able to keep up with over 80 years of polka dots, but she did and the breadth of her work is so incredibly vast.
My hunch was correct, Teddy couldn’t take his eyes off of the psychedelic swirls, shapes and dots and he was engaging with every part of the exhibit in his own way. Kusama’s obsession with polka dots and a repeated-image based work has created a body of art that is so tangible, visceral, and at the same time relatable from a very surface standpoint.
I think “surface” is where the exhibit is most successful, commercially. Kusama’s use of bright, “happy” colors and polka dots masks some of the darker issues behind her works, like a focus on mental illness and a rejection of societal constraints on identity. Her exhibitions draw in viewers with the seemingly happy tone and have become somewhat of a pilgrimage for social media-ites seeking to document their own experiences and identity through portraits with her works. I am guilty of this also, but perhaps this is where her genius lays – we document ourselves over and over in the same yellow polka-dotted rooms to the point that we “obliterate” our own identities. Then, we essentially, become part of the idea behind her work, of a depersonalization of identity, in the social media sphere en masse.
No matter how much I try to analyze or understand our current relationship to Kusama’s work, the fact remains that Teddy loved the exhibit and I ended up bringing Alfie back on a different outing as well. Maybe later in life both kids will have their own perspective on Kusama’s work that will relate to their generation, but for now, we’ll go even if just to stare wonderingly at the bright colors and polka dots.
