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拍品專文
Painted in vivid red and black, Yayoi Kusama’s Hat (OBQ) (2002) is a jewel-like vision of one of her most characterful motifs. Against a background webbed with one of the artist’s signature ‘Infinity Nets’ is a summer hat tied with a ribbon. The hat is adorned with another famous pattern of Kusama’s, the polka dot: its striped design strobes between red on black and black on red, creating a hypnotic, hallucinatory effect. Kusama began depicting hats in 1980 and created numerous paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures of this subject across the decade, later returning to the image in the early 2000s.
Kusama came back to painting with renewed energy in the 1980s, having withdrawn from the medium for several years following her return to Japan from the United States in 1973. While she continued to employ the well-known abstract language of dots, webs and nets that had established her fame—related to hallucinations she had experienced since childhood—these now proliferated over figurative forms including plants, animals, eyes and mouths, transforming them into psychedelic icons. The hat, like these objects, carried art-historical echoes, evoking René Magritte’s bowler-hatted Surrealist everyman and other precedents.
The hat can also be seen as something of a self-portrait. In 1960s New York, Kusama created extravagant hats and other garments to wear to exhibition openings and her early ‘Happenings’, which included clothed and nude participants. During this period she also launched the Yayoi Kusama Fashion Company, producing clothes and accessories that were sold in American department stores. Kusama was a pioneer in merging art and performance with fashion, her practice expanding across different media and into daily life. She continues to wear polka-dotted outfits of her own design to this day, and has collaborated with major fashion houses over the past two decades. Pulsating against its kaleidoscopic backdrop, Hat (OBQ) is a vibrant emblem of Kusama’s determination to express herself through her art.
Kusama came back to painting with renewed energy in the 1980s, having withdrawn from the medium for several years following her return to Japan from the United States in 1973. While she continued to employ the well-known abstract language of dots, webs and nets that had established her fame—related to hallucinations she had experienced since childhood—these now proliferated over figurative forms including plants, animals, eyes and mouths, transforming them into psychedelic icons. The hat, like these objects, carried art-historical echoes, evoking René Magritte’s bowler-hatted Surrealist everyman and other precedents.
The hat can also be seen as something of a self-portrait. In 1960s New York, Kusama created extravagant hats and other garments to wear to exhibition openings and her early ‘Happenings’, which included clothed and nude participants. During this period she also launched the Yayoi Kusama Fashion Company, producing clothes and accessories that were sold in American department stores. Kusama was a pioneer in merging art and performance with fashion, her practice expanding across different media and into daily life. She continues to wear polka-dotted outfits of her own design to this day, and has collaborated with major fashion houses over the past two decades. Pulsating against its kaleidoscopic backdrop, Hat (OBQ) is a vibrant emblem of Kusama’s determination to express herself through her art.