YAYOI KUSAMA KA EXHIBITION IN BANGKOK

YAYOI KUSAMA KA EXHIBITION @PLAYGROUND
Exhibition : October 15 - October 31, 2005
Play Gallery @ Playground

“Yayoi Kusama Ka!”, the first ever exhibition in Thailand by internationally renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Recognised for her deep penetrating stare, avant-garde Kusama is regarded by many today as Japan’s greatest living artist. With an incredible and influential career that spans some six decades, since early childhood Kusuma has been affected by mental illness, which has helped fuel her hallucinogenic repetitious dot and net filled paintings and sculptures. She moved to America from 1957-73, where she became a pioneer of large, soft sculptural installations and environmental sculptures, as well as staging radical happenings and anti-war demos. For 100 Tonson, enigmatic Kusuma will transform the entire gallery interior with a re-visitation of her 2000 floating rainbow dot and large balloon installation Dots Obsession New Century. The forecourt area of 100 Tonson will also display Dots Obsession, a unique custom decorated car designed by Yayoi Kusuma. The vibrant yellow and black polka dot covered exterior was one of five customised commissions by leading Japanese artists, which were recently auctioned for charity at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. This is the first time this one-of-a-kind artwork be presented in an art exhibition. A permanent exhibit at 100 Tonson that will seldom be seen on Bangkok’s streets, the swirling biomorphic patterned design flies across the surface of the car exuding a pulsating energy. In conjunction with the exhibition at Tonson, the gallery has organised a display of Kusama’s original prints at Play Gallery upstairs at new design mall Playground on Soi Tonglor. The prints on view are selected from the 1980s to the present. At 76 years of age, Yayoi Kusuma has created an immense body of work that has been seen all over the globe, including the first ever solo show by a painter at the Japanese pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale, retrospectives at MoMA in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the recent exhibition Kusamatrix at Mori Art Museum. A contemporary art icon since the 1960s, Kusama is also a successful filmmaker and author. Today she voluntarily resides in a Japanese mental institution, from where she continues to produce her obsessive idiosyncratic visions.