Yayoi Kusama

A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.

Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art.

Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama is best known for her inexhaustible creations involving polka dots, pumpkins, and vibrant colors. Her love of design has seen her join forces with top fashion houses.

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? By tracing the concept of the bad girl in Japan as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. The essays explore deviancy in richly diverse media. Mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls, and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.

While I was staying in New York in the 1960s during the rise of the hippie movement, I filmed performances of body painting by the artist, Kusama Yayoi, together with the performers. As I wasn't satisfied with merely documenting her performance, made super-impositions of flowers over the performance, more as a film poem than a documentary, since flowers was the symbol of the hippie movement as given the name "flower children."

A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration. —Jud Yalkut

Japan's Yayoi Kusama is one of the most closely watched female artists on the planet. Her works sell for millions of dollars. The allure of her art transcends borders and she constantly stages grand touring exhibitions around the world. Kusama is 87 years old (at the time of filming), but she continues to paint at a frenetic pace of one painting every two or three days, as part of her "My Eternal Soul" series. This program follows Kusama through the process of producing new works, from the initial brush strokes right through to completion. With high-definition video and original music from artist/producer Towa Tei, the program portrays the moment of creation in a striking and dynamic way.

Captures the avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusamas creative process as she diligently works to complete her series of 50 large monochrome drawings. As her work comes to life, one can witness the essence of her art as it wells up in the conflict between life, death, and love.

A flashy polka dot outfit and a pink wig -- these are the trademarks of the 83-year-old avant-garde artist, Yayoi Kusama. In a recent auction, nearly $600 million was bid for her work. Without a doubt, Yayoi Kusama is world-renowned Japanese artist. In 2011, she held the first-ever solo exhibition by an Asian artist at the famous Tate Modern gallery in London. Later, the exhibition went to France and New York. She has also collaborated with Louis Vuitton, where her polka-dotted products have been sold in 450 stores in 5 continents. She has worked tenaciously and energetically on her creative activities in the spotlight of world attention while struggling in the shadows with illness. The real Yayoi Kusama is revealed in this close up encounter.

Yayoi Kusama born March 22, 1929 is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, scat sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono.

This film follows Yayoi Kusama during the preparations for Tate Modern's 2012 retrospective of her work, when she undertook the mammoth physical and mental challenge of creating 100 new works for the largest-ever exhibition of her art.

In April 1985 Kusama staged a performance in the cherry tree grove at Kuhonbutsu Jōshin-ji, a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Commissioned by a professor at Tokyo University, the performance was titled Basara no Hana (Flowers of Extravagance) in reference to the extravagance of the fourteenth-century lord Dōyo Sasaki. He was said to have held a lavish celebration of cherry blossoms near Kyoto that lasted twenty days. For the performance, Kusama encircled the flowering trees with red and white streamers, connecting them in a ‘net’.

She recites a poem about life, death, heaven and the eternal, standing against projections of her immersive environments and paintings.