Oil on fabric

74.5 x 118 cm. 29 3/8 x 46 1/2 in.

Signed in English on bottom right
EXHIBITED
8 Feb – 10 May 1998, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
11 Feb – 11 Apr 1999, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Japan
Important Private Collection, Asia

This work is accompanied with a registration card issued by Yayoi Kusama studio

'Walking' Landscape
Untitled: The Witness of Yayoi Kusama's Performance Art In the 1960s

'I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.'
——Yayoi Kusama

For Yayoi Kusama, her own body is an integral part of her work, and her mind is the primal driving force of her artistic creation. Bold and fearless, Kusama experiments on multiple artistic fields, including painting, sculpture, installation, and costume design, while indulging herself in nature and fantasy. With singular avant-garde ideas, she has become a contemporary pioneer, integrating multiple art trends and creating a fantastic world that extends to infinity.

Striking the World: The Queen of Avant-garde Art Sweeping New York

'That shows her transition from trying to succeed within the gallery system to taking matters into her own hands——she's going to decide where she can show her art.'
—— Heather Lenz, director of Kusama: Infinity

The heyday of Yayoi Kusama's creative life began in New York in the 1960s. At that time, New York had the most active post-war cultural life and public expression across the world. Avant-garde artists gathered in this metropolitan city from all over the world. The individuals had myriad liberal ideas, and each declared his or her anti-war and anti-system attitude, among whom Kusama was one of the most active. Since 1965, Kusama started to devote herself to 'happenings' in which she performed on her own. Regarding the body as a place for artistic experiments, she set up a fashion company that designed and produced eccentric garments. She would dress herself up with such clothes and join the 'happening' performance events in Manhattan. She created the 'Naked Theater' along with local young hippies——they dressed in costumes with polka dots, freeing out their bodies and promoting sexual liberation. Their bold and explosive act sensationalized New York, a city that had long been familiar with unconventional contemporary art. With her rising fame, her academic vision of art also fully bloomed: For example, when her work Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show was exhibited in 1963, repeated photocopies took up the whole exhibition walls. One can perhaps say that Kusama pioneered the concept of Pop Art even before Andy Warhol, the master of screen printing. Though a female artist from Asia, she never submitted herself to any categorization. Explicit and sexual as her work may appear, Yayoi Kusama has struggled with constant pathos for art.

The work Untitled presented this time was created in this background. Not only is it part of the 1960s happening movement in which Kusama took part (which gained her the title of 'avant-garde queen'), the work also made use of the unique medium of clothes, a concentration of her love and devotion for performance art. As there were only three Kusama garments that appeared in the art market of the past ten years, Untitled is assured of particular preciousness. In 1998 and 1999, the work was successively exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, Japan, included in the large-scale touring exhibition 'Out of Action: Between Performance and the Objects.' The exhibition contained 150 representative contemporary artists and cultural pioneers, including masters like Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, and Marina Abramovic. With such prominent exhibition history, this is a work not to miss.

Awakened Body: Externalization of The Inner World

Untitled is a wide-sleeved black upper garment designed by Yayoi Kusama, with structural characteristics derived from the traditional Japanese costume Yukata, and inspiration from the dramatic costumes of European fairy tales. This design originated from a performance on 14th Street in New York in 1966, in which Kusama dressed herself all in black and lay on a soft sculpture bed filled with male sexes. Her contour seemed independent yet striking, simple yet elegant, appealing for the liberation of women's bodies. In Untitled, the artist transformed the soft sculpture in the original performance into the blossoming flowers painted with oil, which implies that the body has broken through imprisonment, and now grows freely, beautifully, and independently. The graceful garment is an indispensable witness of her life story full of audacious liberal thoughts. The practice of using clothing to express artistic ideal is closely related to the 1960s art world's concern of body and feminism. For Yayoi Kusama, the body is not only an extended space of art but also the externalization of individual passion. It is precisely through the use of the body that the artist manages to show brand new female power in the male-dominated Western art scene.

Growing Wilfully: Female Power that Blooms with Flowers

The vivid and colorful poppy flowers drawn on the dark cloth have an elegant but dangerous allure: Kusama seems to conceive of this image as a symbol of women's ambiguous position in the power system. The artist has observed flowers from an early age and has since developed a continuous pattern of depicting flowers brightly and actively. Such a pattern presents a unique visual effect on the fabric and becomes a distinctive 'stamp' standing for female power that she could employ on different surfaces. Kusama's fondness of flowers guided her to the most crucial turn of life. In 1955, out of admiration for Georgia O'Keefe, she wrote to the great expressionist painter of flowers. The latter encouraged Kusama to study art in the United States. Kusama's life experience is like that of a colorful poppy flower, tainted nevertheless with black loneliness and cruelty. She competed in a world where art and power are disrespectful of femininity. However, with her action, she responded to Linda Nochlin's inspective question: 'Why have there been no great women artists?' Using her body to rebel against patriarchy, Kusama is a heroine who contributed significantly to dismantling the hegemonic art system of her time.

Price estimate:
HKD: 800,000 – 1,200,000
USD: 103,200 – 154,800

Auction Result:
HKD: 944,000