草間 彌生 SOLO EXHIBITION

A delightful pop art exhibition at the Non Gallery

Yayio Kusama, a famous Japanese avant-garde sculptor, painter and novelist, born in 1929 in Nagano Prefecture (Japan), presents her solo exhibition on the first floor of the Gallery, 4-1 Chang An East Road until the 29th August. The young gallery proposes different kinds of artistic works: the first floor is dedicated to mature and major contemporary artists like Yayio Kusuma; the second floor is more focused on the young generation of modern painters like Joyce Ho. One of the aims of the gallery is to give a chance to young artists to be better known. So the gallery team, who is always searching for new talents, invites them to expose their works. As the art director of the gallery wishes to maintain a high quality in the exhibitions, she has chosen not to rent the place, findings private founds by selling paintings and so.

Yayio Kusama, an eighty years old artist, who lived many years in the USA in the 60’s, has been distinguished by the International Association of Art Critics in 1996 and has received many awards and honors: for example, she was given in 2002, the French ‘Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ (as Officier) and in 2006, the National Lifetime Achievement Awards, the Order of the Rising Sun, and The Praemium Imperiale. Her exhibitions traveled all over the world, showed in such towns as New York, Seoul, Paris, or Venice…

Using psychedelic bright and flashy colors; painting red, green and yellow polka dots on women bodies– one of her obsessions, those colored spots symbolizing the return to the universe of nature as we are constituted by thousand billiards of atoms, like all things on earth-; creating amazing and puzzling bags and shoes – with some very phallic motifs represented by high mushrooms emerging from the inside of a golden or red shoe-, her paintings look like a kaleidoscopic picture of inner self. With this infinite repetition and multiplication of signs, she questions our self on our unconscious, our education, our culture, but also on drug and free love.

Besides those themes, its experiments bring her to question the feminine universe and this mysterious artist, who benefits in her country of a big respect and exercises a considerable influence on the young generation, is to discover even if her works can seem disturbing and surprising to a neophyte. DVDM