Yayoi Kusama Opens Her Own Museum in Tokyo

The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened on 1 October 2017 in the Bentencho neighbourhood of Shinjuku, in Tokyo. It is run by a foundation set up by the artist, who was 88 at the time, and it stands a short distance from her studio and from the hospital where she has lived by choice since the 1970s.

The building

The museum is a slim white tower of five floors, designed by the Japanese firm Kume Sekkei. It was completed in 2014 and stood unused for three years, its purpose unannounced, before the opening was made public. Its rounded corners and large rectangular windows give it a quiet presence in a residential street.

The ground floor holds the entrance and a small shop. The second and third floors are galleries for paintings and works on paper. The fourth floor is used for installations, including the mirrored infinity rooms for which Kusama is best known. The fifth floor has a reading room with documents on her career, and opens to a roof terrace with a sculpture under the sky.

The opening exhibition

The first exhibition was titled “Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art” and ran until 25 February 2018. It showed paintings from My Eternal Soul, the large series of brightly coloured canvases that Kusama began in 2009, with earlier black-and-white drawings, a new pumpkin installation in a mirrored room and a mosaic-covered pumpkin on the roof.

The museum changes its exhibition about twice a year, drawing on the foundation’s collection.

How to visit

The museum is small, and entry is controlled accordingly. Tickets are sold only online, in advance, for fixed time slots of 90 minutes, and there are no sales at the door. They are released at the start of each month for the month after next and often sell out within minutes for weekends. The museum is open from Thursday to Sunday and on national holidays. The nearest stations are Ushigome-Yanagicho on the Oedo line and Waseda on the Tozai line.

Kusama elsewhere in Japan

The artist was born in Matsumoto, in Nagano prefecture, where the city art museum has a permanent display of her work, and her yellow pumpkin on the pier at Naoshima is among the best-known artworks in the country. For Naoshima, see our report on the Naoshima New Museum of Art. In Tokyo, her white pumpkins hung in the atrium of Ginza Six when it opened in the same year.