Yayoi Kusama and 'Self-obliteration' - II

A further perspective on Yayoi Kusama's 'self-obliteration' from Nilesh Patel on The Culture Trip website (http://explore.theculturetrip.com/):

'One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle’ - Kusama.

... As a child, Kusama was physically abused by her mother, and around that time, another world started to open up for her, a world of visions and hallucinations. In 1939, at the age of 10, she created the drawing, Untitled. This piece shows an image of her mother’s face against a background, all of it covered in polka dots. The polka dots are not only representations of what she saw, but also symbolize the sun, moon, earth and the whole universe, more importantly, the infinity of the universe. At such a young age, it was the start of Kusama’s representation of what she saw in her alternate reality, and was the beginning of what would fill the rest of her life; a life-long exploration into herself, an ongoing obsession with polka dots, and various visual processes of how she could represent her own self-obliteration.

...
Infinity Nets was an expression of infinite time, space and distance, which cannot be calculated. ...

With Kusama, there is no difference between her as an artist and her art, both are intrinsically intertwined; her art is her life. ... She has said, that if she did not have her art, she would have killed herself a long time ago. Kusama has dedicated her whole life to disassembling her identity and freeing the self. In many of her pieces, we can see her in the continual process of obliterating herself. Her polka dots are not only universal signs of the outer world of the earth and stars, but are also signs of the inner world of cells. Her work goes from the inner to the outer and back to the inner, killing the ‘I’ so that we can be set free and unified with the universe.

‘Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dot, we become part of the unity of our environment’ - Kusama.