Acrylic on canvas

91 × 72.7 cm. 35 7/8 × 28 5/8 in.

Signed in English, titled in Japanese and dated on the reverse
PROVENANCE
7 Sep 2007, Mallet Tokyo Autumn Auction, Lot 76
Acquired directly by present important private Asian collector from the above

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

Souls dance for the origin of life
Yayoi Kusama's Rare Work Soul of the Night

“I have been pursuing the wish for happiness from the depths of my heart, trying to tell what love is like, and using time as a weapon of art. The fireworks are sometimes gorgeous and scattered in the night sky. I will never forget the shock of the colours of sparkles that covers my body. I want to hear what you say, this is a memo of love to you, you know I'm longing to leave a beautiful footprint.”

――Yayoi Kusama

In her works from the 1940s to the present, art has been, as she says, her “weapon in the face of life,” helping her to escape the pain of mental illness and recording her perceptions of life, nature, and her thoughts on social phenomena and art history. Through her diverse creative expressions such as paintings, performance art, installations, novels and poems, she expresses her manifesto to the world - a “manifesto of love”, hoping that she and the viewers will, in the illusion she has created, let go of their prejudices, and step into a world that is in harmony with nature, a world full of love and peace. Her works are a “love memo” that she leaves to the world.

Unique and Joyful Tadpoles

Throughout her life, in addition to her specific depictions of tangible objects such as pumpkins and flowers, Yayoi Kusama has created many iconic personal elements in the field of abstraction, the most important of which is that since 1958, she has abandoned the visual focus and traditional forms of composition. Simply repeat single elements such as netting and polka dots, filling the entire canvas with them and leading the viewer into a state of what seems like weightlessness. The viewers are encouraged to reactivate all five senses to try to understand the unknown world in front of them. Most of the works in this category are named “Untitled”, “Infinity Nets”, and “Infinity Dots” in an attempt to eliminate the author's subjective emotions. In Kusama's repetition of single elements, between 1988 and 1992, one element emerged as a departure from the nets and dots: the tadpole-like symbols that combine dots and lines. In these five years, Kusama created no more than fifteen paintings with the repetitive tadpole symbols, making them a resounding rhythm. These works are given names about “Fire”, “Love” or “Soul”, reflecting another side of Kusama's personality, showing her poetic soft heart. Among the works featured in this auction is Soul of the Night, completed in 1990. At the time of its creation, Kusama's international reputation was on the verge of exploding, as in 1987 when she held her first major retrospective in Japan at the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, which received extensive coverage on Fuji TV, NHK, and Tokyo TV, and then Kusama's whirlwind swept to the United States in 1989 when the International Center for Contemporary Art in New York invited her to hold a retrospective, and she was featured for the first time on the cover of the Art In America magazine. The first time a Japanese artist ever had this honor, and her work Soul of the Night, which was completed during this golden age, embodies, in a way, Kusama's celebration of her artistic achievement at that time.

A Welling Circle, an Ode to Life

“My art is continuously created in the context of contemplating what it is to live and to die, confronting the theme of ‘what is human', a matter of life and death.”

――Yayoi Kusama

In Kusama's performance in New York, Holland and Sweden in the late 1960s, she recruited nude models as performers and drew dots on their bodies in the street to match the music, thus making a declaration of “anti-war”, “love and peace” and “sexual liberation”. Her courage to face the autonomy of the body, the birth and death of the flesh, desire, and life, went beyond the world at an early stage. In Soul of the Night, she also boldly applied a red colour like blood as the background with a pulsating force of life. In the process, she added rhythmic lines to the polka dots that previously carried “the same shape as the earth, the sun and the stars,” creating black organic plankton of varying sizes, like tadpoles or small bean sprouts with symbols of hope. In this hot red sea, the sky is covered with the different rhythms of life, and the twisting and turning lines point to the direction they are going. The black individuals in the painting move forward in all directions as if with consciousness, gathering into one dynamic, rhythmic, cyclical air after another, breaking through the boundaries in the invisible, expanding the limited canvas to infinity, in which the black individuals either strive and surge forward and try to leap out, or follow the footsteps of the former in search of an exit, or exchange secret messages in the encounter with each other, or go their separate ways, or wander, simply showing the nature of existence.

As the title of the painting suggests, these black living beings with souls are showing us a journey of life. Kusama used the most minimal colours, the dots and lines, and the repetition of a single element, allowing people to experience and feel life from its birth, and the complex interpersonal relationships that are woven into a vivid picture of life. This is perhaps Kusama's most endless artistic charm - to tell the viewer the most intricate yet real story of life in the most condensed way. This is like the poem of the Indian literary scholar Tagore, “The night kisses the fading day whispering to his ear, ‘I am death, your mother. I am to give you fresh birth'.” It shakes the soul of every viewer and makes one's soul sing in the wilderness.

Price estimate:
HKD: 5,000,000 - 8,000,000
USD: 636,900 - 1,019,100

Auction Result:
HKD: 6,000,000