Yayoi

There was a big new exhibition for Yayoi Kusama being held at M+.  With our memberships, Veronica and I were able to get discounted tickets to attend.  It was a nice feeling walking through the crowded halls of the exhibition.  The coronavirus restrictions had been largely rolled back and so there was an increasing feeling of a return to normality.  Everyone was still masked up, but it was nice to be amongst the crowds again.

The Antony Gormley exhibition was finished which I felt was a bit of a shame.  The near endless sea of little figures looking up at you was quite a dramatic and moving exhibition, but it was also good to see new and famous exhibitions slowly cycling through Hong Kong.  I had been to some Kusama exhibitions in the past in other cities and I was always impressed by the scale of what was put together.  She has always had an eye for scale and some of her more interactive pieces were always quite fun.

I was a bit surprised by this exhibition.  The previous Yayoi exhibitions I had been too had focused almost exclusively on the large installations and the pumpkins.  These were her signature pieces, but there was little else on display.  This exhibition however was far more expansive and tracked her entire career over 70 years.  It was an impressive collection of works to have all in one place and showed how she had developed over the years.  There was only one pumpkin to be found in the entire exhibition, with far more focus being placed on some of the more edgy ideas she worked with when she was young.  One thing that was surprising was her young obsession with sex and phallic objects.  

Seeing piece after piece, covered in phallic objects was not what I had been expecting.  Kusama has become so heavily embraced by the mainstream media with its focus on her polkadots and pumpkins, that I (like many others) had grown to only know her on that basis.  It meant that my entire image of her was a very clean cut and child friendly version, which it seemed was a very far cry from the reality of who she was and what drove her earlier artistic endeavours.

Downstairs in the basement area, we joined a long line to see one of her big installation works.  It was a large mirror room full of her trademark polkadots.  This was more of what I remembered.  After a long wait in the queue, it was our turn.  We were only given 20 seconds inside the mirrored room, but in that short amount of time we were able to embrace the reality warping experience of the infinity mirrors. 

It was a surprising exhibition, it didn't deliver the usual expected "Kusama" pieces that most people have come to embrace.  Yet this was probably more unique and insightful than any of her other exhibitions I had been to in the past.  This look back through her long catalogue of work was a far better explanation of who she was as an artist than the other exhibitions which had provided only a narrow range of her work as an artist.