Yayoi Kusama might be more visible now than ever before. Widely known for her immersive Infinity Rooms, the Japanese artist, 92, is enjoying a flurry of major exhibitions around the world this summer, including at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, London’s Tate Modern, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Perhaps most notable is “Cosmic Nature,” which transforms the New York Botanical Gardens into a fantasy realm populated by her otherworldly, plant-like creations.
Though her work’s bold, vaguely cartoonish qualities lend themselves well to going viral, a widely shared video of Typhoon Lupit sweeping one of her famed Pumpkin sculptures into the Seto Inland Sea off the coast of Japan recently did the social media rounds for a different reason. The work suffered major damage when the storm’s downpours and 78-mile-per-hour winds whisked the spotted gourd away from its seaside perch at Naoshima’s Benesse Art Site, where the six-foot-tall sculpture had sat since 1994 as Kusama’s first en plein air work. The video shows choppy waves thrashing Pumpkin about relentlessly, exposing its hollow insides and cracks in its surface.
