Japan's queen of spots reigns in the garden of the imagination. By Marina Vaizey.
Pure euphoria! The lady, a mere 87, her stature diminutive, her hair and lipstick a blazing scarlet, is a painter, but also a draughtsman, a sculptor, a creator of environments and installations, a performer, a designer of objects and clothing (affordable too at UniQlo) an illustrator, a writer, a poet, and an all-round polymath. Kusama has lived by choice for nearly 40 years in a psychiatric hospital in her native Japan, working indefatigably.
It is typical that her work remains accessible even though the grand installations and large paintings are only available to an institution, gallery or collector with prodigious resources. One of her subtle orgies of dots has illustrated an inexpensive edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, so we can all have a Kusama on our shelves. Her obsessive workload may be keeping her demons away, but her therapy is our joy...
