Acrylic on canvas

45.5 x 38 cm. 17 7/8 x 14 1/2 in.

Titled in Japanese, signed in English on the reverse
PROVENANCE
Whitestone Gallery, Tokyo
Important Private Collection, Asia

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

Sailing Against the Waves
Yayoi Kusama's Key Work in the 1970s – On the Ocean

“Among the waves of people
I have managed to survive this long life.
How many times did I think about putting a knife to my neck seeking death,I collected my thoughts and got up again.
I wish for life's bright sunshine.
I want to live forever.”
——Yayoi Kusama

In 2019, the documentary film Kusama: Infinity was finally released worldwide after 17 years of production. In the film, we can see the 90-year-old Kusama still working tirelessly. At the end of the documentary, she stared firmly at the camera with eyes wide open, and spoke out loud her «declaration of life» first above written with her hoarse and husky voice, slowly but articulately. Her extraordinary dedication and love for art would touch every audience›s heart.

Throughout her life, Yayoi Kusama has observed the world and depicted life attentively. As a pioneer of Pop Art, she would bring new inspirations to the international art scene on each occasion of appearance. In her word, “This was my 'epic,' summing up all that I was.” She transforms all that is spiritually painful into something aesthetically sublime, endowing her paintings with artistic ideas that are as magnificent as stardust, and leaving the viewers in awe of the pure beauty of her works.

Eyes of Innocence, Heart of Ocean

The motif of eyes, applied by the artist throughout her career, occupies a unique position in Yayoi Kusama's creations. On the Ocean presented in this spring auction is the first oil on canvas that Yayoi Kusama executed with the image of eyes, making the eyes an independent aesthetic object. The artist does not only deconstruct the theme with surrealist sensibilities but also places the subject in a figurative scene of nature. With bold and bright colors, broad layout and profound metaphorical meanings, the image presents a magnificent individual epic of the artist. As a brand-new attempt to break through her oil painting practice in the 1970s, this painting is an essential milestone in Kusama›s establishment of her unique vocabulary and style during the 1970s and 1980s.

The work, On the Ocean, represents the fantastic imagination of Yayoi Kusama with an unconventional composition: above the ocean where waves are roaring, two magical eyes loom into the view. The large scale of the eyes resembles the giant eye in The False Mirror by René Magritte. The unusual combination of eyes and ocean echoes Magritte›s depiction Sheherazade, in which the pair of eyes of Sheherazade, the Persian girl in One Thousand and One Nights, is here transformed into an idiosyncratic symbol of Kusama's own. The pupils of the two eyes are of different sizes and positions; one looks straight ahead and the other slightly upwards, with an implicit interaction between their gazes. The curious and fearless “eyes of innocence” seems to have a “heart of ocean” that embraces Omnia.

In 1973, Yayoi Kusama, who had already risen to fame in the international art scene, returned to Japan from New York, only to find herself driven from pillar to post in the conservative local painting world. However, she was not afraid of challenging the environment and sought to make a voice in the male-dominated contemporary art world. The works that she developed during this period are marked with the awakening of self-consciousness, perseverance, and determination. In the lower part of On the Ocean, Yayoi Kusama made a depiction of her situation at that time: waves of polka dots roll wantonly, as in Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which symbolizes the severe condition that confronts the individuals or collectives; the waves of sweeping momentum almost engulf the tiny boat in the center, while the latter raises sails and voyages across the ocean. The hull is painted in fluorescent pink color, echoing with the eyes, as if it is an eyelash that “dropped” from above. All these elements in the picture carry the artist's thoughts, feelings, and reflections on the outside world. As early as 1963, Yayoi Kusama had placed a white boat filled with explicit male sexes in the center of her solo exhibition Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show to show her rebellion against hegemonic power. But here, she marks the white boat with her signature by putting a fluorescent green letter «K» on the white sail to further claim her authorship of this imagery. Kusama is thus «present» in the picture, implying that female power is about to land on the stage of the new era.

The Tentacles of Time, The Passage to the Future

In On the Ocean, the variation of textures and the multitude of symbols become the prominent features of the work. Yayoi Kusama sets the blue and the green eyes as the focal point of the composition, thus creating a hallucinatory effect with her iconic polka dots, which spread out like infinitely proliferating cells and at the same time show the profundity and pleasant order of the ocean. As the artist said, “the polka dots resemble the shape of the sun, the source of power and life; while it also has the shape of the moon, the center of tranquility.” In On the Ocean, all the polka dots are transformed into “sun, moon, and stars,” making people forget the realistic dimension of space and enter a boundless virtual reality.

Above the pupils of the polka dot pattern, the upper eyelids painted in blue and green echo the colors of the pupils, while the tentacle-like eyelashes extend toward the sky. The dark green color of the eyelashes is complementary to the fluorescent surface of the background, resulting in a vibrant and harmonious overall tone of the canvas. At the same time, the tentacle-like form is also closely related to Yayoi Kusama's soft sculpture series in the 1970s. With a gentle style yet aggressive gesture, the peculiar form presents a subversive perspective on gender, which challenges the authority. They are the tentacles of the time, a passage that bears both memories of the past and visions of the future, through which the eyes in the painting interact with their surroundings and reveal an awakening of female power.

The Texture of Space, The Power of Eternality

On the vermilion background behind the eyes, yellows lines interweave with each other and construct a large net structure. Such a net structure first appeared in Yayoi Kusama's paintings when she was only ten, and later became one of her signature images in her early career, by the name of “Infinite Nets.” This iconic image treats self-ablation as a means of combating fear. In the work, On the Ocean, the net does not only construct a constantly expanding psychedelic space, but also symbolizes the vital nature of life. Through this hallucinatory net structure, Kusama elevates the color and texture on a plane into a “texture of space,” like a retrograde undercurrent in space and time, conveying mysterious power that gives the viewer multiple levels of visual impact. This texture continues all the way to the bottom of the canvas, and melts into the boundless blue ocean. The stripe-like ripples decorated with polka dots are highly abstract, which shows remarkable artificiality – human activities have had profound impacts on nature and the environment, bringing distortion and alienation that mark our modernity. With the lonely ship on the ocean, the image conveys the artist's strong desire to invent a brand-new environment, where she could extend her own “tentacles” into vast freedom.

Price estimate:
HKD: 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
USD: 387,100 – 516,100

Auction Result:
HKD: 6,475,000