Yayoi Kusama, avant-garde artist world-renowned for her obsessive polka dot and net paintings, is opening a museum in the center of Tokyo this fall, the new museum said on its website. The planned five-story museum will open Oct. 1 in Shinjuku Ward where it will ...
A growing number of museums in the country are looking to abandon their no-photos policy amid the rising popularity of smartphones and calls to conform to more liberal global practices. While many famous museums overseas allow visitors to take photos, museums in Japan have long ...
Yayoi Kusama's work has a direct and immediate visual impact. Her obsessions with dots, pumpkins and floppy phalluses have become big crowd pleasers after a spotty career of avant-garde agitation and mental-health issues. The auction house Christie's says she is "now the highest-selling living ...
"Polka-Dot Princess" Yayoi Kusama illuminated the links between creativity and mental illness with her arrival on the New York pop art scene in 1957. More recently the wave of artistry, called art brut, is catching on in Tokyo, where a number of artists with intellectual ...
It's winter. Inclement weather in December far north of Tokyo should come as no surprise: the farms and forests are normally blanketed in snow. So while preparing for our stay at the "House of Light," an installation in Niigata Prefecture by U.S. conceptual artist ...
Just a decade ago, a lithograph by artist Yayoi Kusama would sell for several hundred dollars at best. But now her pieces, some just the size of a magazine, can fetch as much as $74,000. Japan's long-dormant art market has been turbo-charged by Shinzo Abe's ...
It begins with a long, slow hiss. The valves open, and a thick fog is released into the air, pouring from the roof of Dogo Onsen Honkan, the famous three-tiered bathhouse built in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, in 1894. It flows down the side of ...
A series of spring events to promote Japanese food, art and fashion has kicked off in Tokyo as part of the "Cool Japan" campaign, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Among the upcoming events in Tokyo are "Ginza Fashion Week," a tieup ...
Yayoi Kusama was just shy of 30 when she left her hometown of Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture and headed to America to meet her hero, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. It was improbable, even quixotic, but Kusama soon developed an artistic style that endeared her to ...
It looks, at first glance, like a refreshing case of "out with the old, and in with the new": In late 2002 the Tokyo art community bade a teary goodbye to its Mecca, when the falling-down old Sagacho building, home for years to some ...
