"No matter how I may suffer for my art, I will have no regrets. This is the way I have lived my life, and it is the way I shall go on living." Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This engaging memoir reveals her to be a fascinating, maverick figure, channelling her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers.
The decade Kusama spent in New York saw her status change from poverty-stricken artist living in a freezing loft and existing on scraps of food, to doyenne of the counter-cultural art scene. She tells the story of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom she forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan and to relative obscurity in the early 1970s, Kusama admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. It is from this base that she has emerged to add to the seemingly endless stream of artworks and writings that in the past decade have won her international acclaim and seen her the subject of many major exhibitions across the world.
This remarkable autobiography, translated by Ralph McCarthy, provides a powerful insight into the mind of a unique artist, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde.
As well as being a prolific artist, Yayoi Kusama is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street, Manhattan Suicide Addict and Violet Obsession.
Ralph McCarthy has translated many Japanese authors including Osamu Dazai, Ryu Murakami and Kancho Oda.
Pages 256 pages
Number of illustrations 30 black and white illustrations
The book brings us subtly closer to Kusama, who remains, in both her private life and her work, extremely self-absorbed and self-expressive yet stubbornly evasive and mysterious
Art in America
In Infinity Net, esoteric musings are interspersed with art-world gossip, creating an eccentric mix that is part manifesto on artistic form, part juicy tell- all.
Bookforum
She turns her fears and phobias into art, with startling results. So who better to articulate Kusama than the artist herself?
