It’s a big year for Yayoi Kusama: The Japanese multimedia artist best-known for her polka dots and signature neon wigs just closed a retrospective of her work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A similar tribute recently opened at The National Museum of Art in Osaka, running concurrently with a show at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery, where one installation invites children to cover a bone-white family room with candy-colored stickers. And Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs has named Kusama the brand’s latest artist collaborator, making her the only female to ever achieve the honor.

 Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration No.2, 1967. (c) Yayoi Kusama and (c) Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.

The whirlwind continues next week, when Tate Modern will open an homage to the legend, marking the first serious retrospective of the 82-year-old ever mounted in the U.K. Conceived as a chain of immersive environments, the exhibition will include three installations, two projection pieces, and eight rooms of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Kusama’s first room installation, “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show” (1963) will be on view, as well as her notorious film “Kusama’s Self-Obliteration” (1968) and “Clouds” (1984), a sculptural installation of 100 black and white cotton-stuffed cushions.

With a penchant for surrounding her viewer with densely hung displays of work, Kusama was a pioneer of installation art in the 1960s. Her work developed through a series of radical style changes spanning sculpture, painting, collage, film, performance, happenings, fashion design, and publishing. Curator Frances Morris, head of collection for the museum’s international art department, worked closely with Kusama to handpick moments of the most extreme innovation from her six-decade-long career. “We’ve brought these two ideas together by staging each new stance separately, each one in a way that emphasizes the intensity of her working methods and the kind of totalizing experience she hoped to offer the viewer,” Morris says.

Yayoi Kusama, 1965. Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo. (c) Yayoi Kusama, courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. Photo: Eikoh Hosoe. For those wanting to take a step closer into Kusama’s world—she has claimed a neurological disease causes lengthy hallucinations—the Tate will host an entire day of tours, workshops and performances intended to give audiences a more intimate connection with Kusama’s distinct visual universe. At its core is her new interactive digital installation “Hello Cube” (2011), which reacts to both physical activity and Twitter commands.

The exhibition’s grand finale is Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life” (2011), the artist’s largest-ever rendition of her iconic mirrored rooms that was conceived specifically for the show. “But before the visitor gets to this final room, they will encounter a great painter from the 1950s, a uniquely original Pop artist, a cultural activist from the late 1960s and a number of other persona, all of whom are the same Yayoi Kusama,” Morris says. “I’d like the show to celebrate all of these different faces.”  

Tate Modern
Title image: Yayoi Kusama, The Passing Winter 2005 (detail). Presented by the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2008. (c) Yayoi Kusama, courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. Photo: Tate Photography.