草间弥生：圆点女王的世界.docVIP

草间弥生：圆点女王的世界 　　如果你一定要问我从什么时候开始艺术创作的，我可以告诉你，那是在很小很小的时候。我的一生，我活着的每一个日子，都与艺术相关。要是人可以有来世，我还想再做艺术家。无论生与死，艺术对于我来说就是一切。 　　―― 草间弥生（日本艺术家） 　　 　　Yayoi Kusama is 87 years old. But when she is wheeled in， on her blue polka-dotted wheelchair， she looks more like a baby， the sort you might see played by an adult in a British pantomime1）. Her face is large for a Japanese woman and at odds2） with her smallish frame. Apart from her intense， saucer-shaped eyes and the arc of deep red lipstick across her mouth， there is something masculine about her features. She wears a lurid red wig and a dress covered in polka dots. Coiled around her neck is a long red scarf decorated with black squiggles. When she is out of the spotlight， without her splashy red wig and garish outfits， she looks like a nice， grey-haired old lady. It is as if the patterns she has obsessively replicated since childhood have seeped off the canvas and into the three-dimensional world of flesh and blood. 　　Kusama’s story begins in the conservative surroundings of rural Japan in 1929， where she was born in Matsumoto， Nagano prefecture3）， into a family of seedling merchants. One early photo， taken at the age of about 10， shows a serious， rather beautiful girl with short hair， holding an enormous bunch of chrysanthemums4）. So upstanding was her mother’s family， that her father， a philanderer5） who spent much of his time in the company of geisha6）， adopted the Kusama name as his own. At around the time the photograph was taken， Kusama was already producing pencil sketches featuring dots and a net-like motif. Even a portrait of her mother， whom she hated for her strictness and prudish7） values， is covered in dots as though she were suffering from chicken pox. “My parents were a real pain，” she says. “I couldn’t stand it. They were very conservative. My family had been running the business for 100 years. My parents had old customs and morals.” 　　 　　From early childhood Kusama experienced “visual and aural hallucin