Mixed media sculpture

30 × 20 × 10 cm.11 3/4 × 7 7/8 × 3 7/8 in.

Signed in English, dated, titled in Japanese and English on the bottom
PROVENANCE
29 Mar 2019, Christie's Hong Kong Auction, Lot 13
Acquired directly by present important private Asian collector from the above

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

The Miracle of Life
Yayoi Kusama's Soft Sculpture Masterpiece Genesis

In 1993, Yayoi Kusama was invited to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale, where her heavyweight soft sculpture Shooting Star was unveiled. 60 boxes of silver soft sculptures filled an entire wall of the exhibition, emitting a striking light that shook the art world. “Soft sculpture” is an important branch of Yayoi Kusama's work that emerged in the 1960s during the artist's “New York period”: in 1962, she created her first soft sculpture Accumulation No. 1, using an armchair found by her artist friend Donald Judd, numerous stuffed dildos sewn from bed sheets, and high heels, expressing Kusama's psychological reaction to her childhood fear of sex and the oppression of women in society. It echoes the feminist movement that was emerging in the United States at the time.

The Avant-Garde Loner: Artistic Concepts of Pioneers

Accumulation No. 1 was exhibited in a group show at the Green Gallery in New York the same year it was completed, along with Claes Oldenburg's and Andy Warhol's works, marking the first official appearance of Kusama's soft sculptures. The exhibition was hailed by Laura Hoptman, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, as “the first pop art exhibition in American history” and had a profound impact on the global contemporary art scene. It was only six months after this exhibition that Oldenburg began to create his soft sculpture installations, and art historians generally believe that Kusama's works published at that time were the inspiration for Oldenburg's subsequent work. This shows that Kusama was at the forefront of the times in terms of creative form, concept, and vocabulary, which have evolved from the 1960s to the present. Her soft sculptures have been collected by major international institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the M+ Art Museum in Hong Kong, and have become an important strand of her own creative work, as well as one of the faces of the pop art movement that has emerged in the United States. In this spring auction, we present Genesis, a large-scale installation completed in the same year as the Shooting Star at the 1993 Venice Biennale, which can be regarded as the parent of the Shooting Star.

The Spark of Creation, the Infinite Leap of Life

In the silver square box of Genesis, five long fabrics of different lengths and sizes intertwine and meet in the centre from different directions. The thick surface of the silver foil makes the work reflect the luster of a technological object. The folds and texture of the fabric resemble the human skin under the traces of age. The main shape of the soft sculpture is a departure from the previous Accumulation No.1, now her creative experience and artistic status had reached a high level of maturity and global recognition, she has already devolved her fear of sex, also the rebellion and anger against the unequal treatment of gender in society into a personal poetic drawing and personalized imagination in her creation. The soft sculpture is like the physical reproduction of abstract lines in her paintings. In the organic shapes that develop from the bottom, they are like the tentacles of life that spread outward to the top, bottom, left, right, and centre, and intertwine with each other to weave an eternal circle of life. The title of the work, Genesis, echoes the classic scene in Michelangelo's famous painting Genesis - the undulating and intertwining lines of the soft sculpture, just like the moment when Adam and God's fingers meet in Genesis, illuminating the origin of life, and also in this work, the landscape of human life.

A Silvery Melting World

Like Kusama's Shooting Star at the Venice Biennale, Genesis is covered in silver. This use of silver was first seen in Kusama's 1963 exhibition Accumulation: One Thousand Boats Show at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The sail was covered in silver, which is one of Kusama's favorite colours. It not only attracts the viewer's attention but also draws the viewer deeper into the fantastic illusion. In Genesis, the silver colour throughout the work makes it an eye-catching and shimmering image that dissolves the boundaries of the subject, creating a melting environment that makes the viewer's eyes lose focus. This echoes the artist's most ambitious artistic concept of dissolving the primitive will and immersing the viewer in a lustrous visual experience.

Price estimate:
HKD: 450,000 – 650,000
USD: 57,300-82,800

Auction Result:
HKD: --