Phantom Shadow Yayoi Kusama Analysis

Phantom shadow

Transformation is a seemingly miraculous change in the appearance of scenery. It also is a change of an object from one form to another; it includes both inward and outward, functional to dysfunctional changes. The artist, Yayoi Kusama shows transformation in her artwork, 'The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens' (2005) and 'Soul under the moon' (2002). In Yayoi Kusama's artwork, she uses mirrors to transform the intense repetition of her earlier paper works and paintings transform into a sensual experience.

Yayoi Kusama has been working as a painter, environmental artist and sculptor for the past 50 years. Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is a self-described "obsessional artist," known for her extensive

Unlimited pumpkins make the space of artwork an illusion. Polka dots are synonymous with Yayoi Kusama. The artist makes use of bright coloured, densely-blooming dots to give people a kind of fear of being swallowed. However, when we take a macro view, these dots become cells, molecular. Yayoi Kusama's dots have been used everywhere as her artwork has grown in ambition and scale because she has said "Polka dots are fabulous.", and she has continued to frame the dots as the vestige of her own childhood trauma. In the artwork, Yayoi Kusama wants to transform the polka dot to show the horror and the devastation resulting from war. The earth is just a polka dot in a million stars in the universe, when we eliminate nature and body with polka dots, we all will become part of our environment. "Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment." from Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama 's polka dots transform her own childhood trauma, every single polka dots is about her trauma. And every polka dots with different size is representative her different trauma in her childhood, have big trauma, have tiny trauma. She brings out that she lost her happy childhood, in fact, in the past decade, her works presented a direct manifestation of the idealized "lost"

The main themes of this artwork are repetition and infinity, however, at the same time the mirror is an important symbol in this artwork, as its reflexes repeat until they disappear. At this point, the viewer may feel confused and disoriented in this limitless and expansive room. She uses mirror, on the walls and ceilings to create an illusion space of infinite reflection in a deep space area. Dots appear on the surfaces of her sculptures and installations, which recall the illusion she had suffered when she as a child, she said "Since my childhood, I have always made works with polka dots. Earth, moon, sun and human beings all represent dots; a single particle among billions." Her surroundings were entirely covered with this repeating dots patterns. In this work, the unity of repetition is achieved through the use of dark light, water, and mirrors in a restricted spaces, while the fluctuating area of Yayoi Kusama's net paintings are echoed in the floating garish colour of ping-pong balls. Through the floating ping-pong balls in this artwork, the composition is made informal. Yayoi Kusama's net paintings which surround the viewer have brought out a message that the possibility of her 'net' paintings can show infinite expansion into space. She transformed the image of ping-pong balls in her illusion, by repeating the dots to symbolise her surroundings as a