Trend spotting

I first encountered Yayoi Kusama in London, at the Tate Modern museum. I didn’t meet her personally; I wandered into one of her exhibits, drawn in by the polka-dotted red balls suspended at the entrance. When it comes to art, first impressions count, and I found the red balls so visually arresting and playful that I had to take a closer look.

Inside, I felt like Alice taking her first tentative step into Wonderland. Kusama’s art doesn’t consist of paintings on walls or even mere installations. If you consider an entire room an installation, then you could say you don’t just view or experience Kusama’s art — you enter it.

I entered a room that would have been a typical living room, if you went by the furnishings. There was a dining set and a rocking chair in front of a TV. Little area rugs scattered about. But the whole room was submerged in black light, and dots in rainbow shades of neon covered everything, from the flower vase in the center of the table to the TV screen. 

Dots fluoresced on the floor under my feet, on the way to the next tableau, another black room covered in mirrors. You know how mirrors create that effect of your image multiplied to infinity? I don’t know how Kusama did it, but she created that illusion using pinpoints of light that changed color every few minutes — the effect was like being in deep space surrounded by stars, perhaps seconds after the Big Bang happened. And, like bits of planetary debris, I was totally blown away.

Artist Meets Designer

The brilliant Japanese artist had the same effect on Marc Jacobs. In 2006, the creative director of Louis Vuitton encountered Kusama in Tokyo, but it was a meeting of a more personal sort. An art collector, Jacobs was a fan of Kusama’s sculptures and paintings: “The obsessive character and the innocence of her artwork touch me,” he says. “She succeeds in sharing her vision of the world with us.”

Spot the difference: You’ll see Kusama’s organic patterns repeated in Louis Vuitton’s iconic leather goods, ready-to-wear, shoes, accessories, watches and jewelry. The Louis Vuitton boutique is located in Greenbelt 4.

The admiration was mutual: Kusama, whose works include performance art that examines clothing and the body, had a deep respect for Jacobs’ creativity. A photo of their meeting hangs today on the wall of the Kusama Studio in Tokyo.

The obsessive, immersive nature of Kusama’s work isn’t accidental. Her art originates from a hallucination that took place in a dining room: she saw the red flower patterns on the tablecloth start to spread across the walls, the floor and on herself.

Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama seized all the techniques available to the artist (sculpture, painting, filmmaking, photography, and writing) to capture this disorientation. In the 1950s, she made a name for herself with the “Infinity Nets,” a monochrome series of paintings that depicted a minuscule, unique element like a web repeated to infinity.

In 1958 Yayoi Kusama settled in New York, where she mixed with the avant-garde world and exhibited alongside Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd. In her installations, she recovered everyday objects of soft, prominent forms, and carried out performances in symbolic areas of the city.

Since her return to Japan in 1973, the artist, who describes herself as obsessive, has been living in a psychiatric hospital and goes to her studio every day to work on her art. She received recognition quite late, from the end of the 1980s onwards, showing at prestigious exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris. A traveling retrospective dedicated to her today (the one I saw) confirms her status as an important figure in contemporary art.

Dots What’s Called A Collaboration

Since it began in 1854, Louis Vuitton has maintained close ties with the art world. This part of the house’s heritage intensified under the artistic direction of Marc Jacobs; consequently Louis Vuitton has associated itself with the first retrospective dedicated to the Japanese artist. The exhibition, which invites visitors to immerse themselves into Kusama’s world, has been traveling from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, continued its journey to the Tate Modern in London and is currently at the Whitney Museum in New York City.

In a tribute to Kusama, Louis Vuitton has issued a collection that stemmed from the collaboration between Kusama and Jacobs, interpreting her most emblematic artworks.

The artist then and now: The obsessive, immersive world of Kusama consists of waves, dots and mirrors repeated ad infinitum, spawned by a vision the artist had as a child.

The starting points for the collection were obsession and seriality. You’ll see Kusama’s organic patterns repeated in Louis Vuitton’s iconic leather goods, ready-to-wear, shoes, accessories, watches and jewelry. Treated in vibrant, hybrid colors, polka dots cover the products in the infinite pattern Kusama is known for, expressing the unlimited possibilities of playing with scale, color and density. When a “Kusama-esque” figure comes to life, patterns ripple and lead the eye into a stroboscopic game with no beginning, no middle and no end. This hallucinatory motif will also be on display in Louis Vuitton windows worldwide, decorated with emblematic motifs like biomorphic shaped “nerve” sculptures named “Beginning of the Universe,” flowers entitled “Eternal Blooming Flowers in my Mind,” and the red polka dots on a white background I found so attractive — look carefully and you’ll spot figures Kusama named “Self-Obliteration” within the dotted field.

For the artist, who sees her life as “a dot lost among millions of other dots,” this collaboration will allow her to spread her polka dots infinitely across the world and convey her message: “Love forever.”

“It enables her to increase her audience and that of contemporary art in general,” says Jacobs, “the task Louis Vuitton has always set itself.”

Dots An Iphone APP

Louis Vuitton is also introducing an iPhone app dedicated to Kusama to support the house’s collaboration with the Japanese artist. This playful new app allows users to take pictures and customize them with a choice of three creative effects that recall the world of Kusama.

Dots, waves, and mirrors add an artistic and lively vision to your pictures, transforming and deconstructing ordinary photos into visuals inspired by Kusama’s work.

Social sharing functions will also be available within the iPhone app, which will let users share their creations in a fun, personalized photo gallery, either through different social media platforms or on the dedicated mini-site LouisVuittonKusama.com, in a section called “Visions of the Kusama World.”

A new digital experience providing users complete immersion into the world of Yayoi Kusama, this iPhone app is an amazing, interactive tool to create infinite artworks and to share your artistic vision.

This free iPhone app will be available worldwide in two languages: English and Japanese.

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In the Philippines, the Louis Vuitton boutique is located on the ground floor of Greenbelt 4, Ayala Center, Makati.