Latest / Spoken News / Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama dies at the age of 97.

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Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama dies at the age of 97. · Spoken News

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Spoken News where Wikipedia excerpts are read verbatim
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  by a computer. Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama dies at
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  the age of 97. Yayoi Kusama was a Japanese contemporary
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  artist who worked primarily in sculpture and installation. She was
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  also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction,
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  and other arts. Her work was based in conceptual art
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  and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut,
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  pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological,
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  and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of
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  the most important artists to have come out of Japan,
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  was one of the world's top-selling female artists, and ranked No.
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  19 in Sotheby's 2023 list of the Top 50 Artists.
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  Her work influenced her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
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  Kusama was raised in Matsumoto and trained at the Kyoto
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  City University of Arts for a year in a Japanese
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  painting style called Nihonga. She was inspired by American abstract impressionism.
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  She moved to New York City in 1958 and was
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  a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s,
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  especially in the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of
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  the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to
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  public attention when she organized a series of happenings in
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  which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots.
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  She experienced a period in the 1970s during which her
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  work was largely overlooked, but a revival of interest in
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  the 1980s brought her art back into public view. Kusama
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  continued to create art in various museums around the world
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  from the 1950s onwards. She was open about her mental
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  health and resided in a mental health facility since the 1970s.
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  She said that art had become her way to express
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  her mental problems. I fight pain, anxiety and fear every day,
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  and the only method I have found that relieved my
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  illness is to keep creating art, she told an interviewer
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  in 2012. I followed the thread of art and somehow
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  discovered a path that would allow me to live. That's
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  it for now, see the episode notes for sources and licensing,
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  thank you.