YAYOI KUSAME RETROSPECTIVE AT THE TATE MODERN
YAYOI KUSAMA RETROSPECTIVE AT THE TATE MODERN Yayoi Kusama (1929-) was born in Nagano Prefecture in a hill town in the Japanese Alps about 130 miles west of Tokyo just before the second world war. She grew up in a traditional Japanese family with a traditional set of Japanese values that maintained that a woman should complete her education, then marry and have children. However, Yayoi possessed creativity and wanted to fulfill herself through her art rather than taking on a traditional role. This meant that she soon came into direct opposition to her family and especially her mother. Her parent's business was marketing seeds and they were very opposed to Yayoi's artistic vocation. However she managed to complete one year of art school training in Kyoto in 1948 but the constraints of family, gender and being Japanese led her to rebel against these constraints and to become familiar with contemporary American culture but also the legacy of French surrealism, experimental