Mika Yoshitake – författare

Experience the brilliant artist's lifelong obsession with nature and immersion in gardens, a bedrock of her hugely influential work. Yayoi Kusama’s work is the product of an infinite curiosity and obsessive drive to create. Throughout the artist’s long and varied career, there is one persistent yet little-studied through line—her deep engagement with nature. From early sketches depicting flowers at her family’s plant nursery in Japan, to her most recent monumental sculptures of botanical forms poised to take flight, Kusama consistently calls our attention to the patterns, connections, and cycles of living things that are not always visible.KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is the accompanying catalogue to the first comprehensive exploration of the artist’s enduring fascination with the natural world, exhibited across the 250-acre landscape of The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition examines her lifelong awareness and attunement to nature, which serves not merely as a source of inspiration, but is an integral source of power for her artistic language. This profound life force pervades all of Kusama’s work, from studies of the molecular to contemplations of the universal, resulting in a transcendent, cosmic nature.Exhibition guest curator Mika Yoshitake, an independent scholar specializing in postwar Japanese art, and Joanna L. Groarke, NYBG exhibitions curator, catalogue co-editors, bring together essays by art historians, curators, and a scientist, who each present unique interpretations of Kusama’s engagement with the natural world. Featuring more than 120 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and archival photographs, including stunning views of the works displayed in NYBG’s gardens and galleries, KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature offers a new perspective on one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.

The first English-language monograph on the installation artist exploring transnationalism and “wandering as a permanent position”Artist Yukinori Yanagi (born 1959) focuses on large-scale and site-specific installations that interrogate the politics of institutional borders and boundaries often drawing from systems of signs and symbolic imagery. Investigating the notion of “wandering as a permanent position,” Yanagi uses flags as symbols of nationalism and stability of place as a point of departure. Major works pursue the dissolution of symbolic signs of stasis into organic forms that change with time and circumstance.Edited by postwar specialist Mika Yoshitake, this publication is the first comprehensive English-language monograph on Yanagi. Presenting eight series of works from throughout the artist’s 35-year career, this project shares newly translated Japanese texts and artist interviews alongside large-scale reproductions and original contributions by scholars Jane Farver, Reiko Tomii, Bert Winther-Tamaki and Yoshitake. This retrospective of Yanagi’s work provides a platform for English readers to engage with his politically and socially engaged practice for the first time.

Three decades of the beloved Japanese artist’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and morePublished with Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Yoshitomo Nara is among the most beloved Japanese artists of his generation. His widely recognizable portraits of menacing figures reflect the artist’s raw encounters with his inner self. Nara’s oeuvre takes inspiration from a wide range of resources—memories of his childhood, music, literature, studying and living in Germany (1988–2000), exploring his roots in Japan, Sakhalin and Asia, and modern art from Europe and Japan.Spanning 35 years (1985 to 2020), this book—which accompanies the major career retrospective organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—presents the full range of Nara’s work. It also examines the artist’s work through the lens of his longtime passion—music—and features “liner notes” written by the artist about various albums in his personal collection of 1960s and 70s folk and rock albums, published in English for the first time.The book features paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramic figures, an installation that re-creates his drawing studio, and never-before-exhibited idea sketches that reflect the artist’s empathic eye, shining a light on Nara’s conceptual process. Readers will see the evolution of a dynamic artist who has become more contemplative with age.Yoshitomo Nara was born in 1959 in Aomori, Japan, and graduated with a master's degree from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music and later studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In the fall of 2010, the Asia Society in New York presented the first major New York exhibition of his work. He is represented by Pace Gallery and Blum & Poe.

The first and only comprehensive volume exploring the artist’s best-known and most spectacular seriesPublished with Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.This book presents world-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s most famous series, the Infinity Mirror Rooms, and charts its influence on the course of contemporary art for over 50 years.Kusama’s rooms are filled with multicolored lights that reflect endlessly. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. This definitive publication traces these installations and reveals how, over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities, from Kusama’s “self-obliteration” in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent atmospheres, this publication historicizes her pioneering work amid today’s renewed interest in experiential practices. Generously illustrated, this book invites readers to examine the series’ impact over the course of the artist’s career.Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) has worked not only in sculpture and installation but also painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction and other arts. In her early career in Japan, she produced mostly works on paper. With her late-1950s move to New York City, she joined the ranks of the avant-garde, working in soft sculpture and influencing the likes of Warhol and Oldenburg. At this time, she was also involved with happenings and other performance-oriented works and began to deploy her signature dots. Her work fell into relative obscurity after her return to Japan in 1973, but a subsequent revival of interest in the 1980s elevated her work to the canonical status that it still enjoys today.

Contemporary artists address connections between climate activism and social justice in their workPublished with Hammer Museum.The lungs of our planet are under threat, invaded by carbon emissions, plastics and man-made pollutants. As part of the Getty Center’s PST ART initiative, Breath(e) considers the connections between climate change, environmental justice and social justice through the lens of contemporary art. This book features approximately 45 works focused on climate change by a group of intergenerational contemporary artists, scientists and activists, addressing deforestation, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, water pollution, extraction and atmospheric politics. It features six major new commissions, including a living bee sculpture by Garnett Puett and a garden created by Ron Finley, that extend beyond the art world to make tangible contributions to the protection of our climate.Artists include: Mel Chin, Ryoji Ikeda, Mika Tajima, Cannupa Hasker Luger, Yoshitomo Nara, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Otobong Nkanga, Clarissa Tossin, Zheng Mahler.