By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Heather Lenz
Country: united_states
Year: 2018
Running time: 76
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1893269/reference
Thom says: “This is they type of documentary that rings all my bells. It’s the life story of now hugely successful Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose work now pops the million dollar ceiling, but for years she suffered through bouts of severe depression as well as rejection by critics and buyers. She grew up in a conservative Japanese family where her father was a handsome but scandalous womanizer and her mother was a terrible harpy who destroyed her daughter’s early attempts at art. While still in Japan she wrote a letter of appreciation to Georgia O’Keefe who encouraged the young artist. Kusama later moved to New York, eventually living in Italy for a time, and then while becoming more morose with many thoughts of suicide (she even once jumped out of a 5-story window but a bicycle broke her fall) she decides to return to Japan where she turns herself into a mental asylum where she has lived for the past 20 years. Wherever she’s lived she caused a bit of a stir but she wasn’t taken very seriously. In the meantime as she continues to evolve through one period after another she’s emerged as the highest paid woman artist in the world and her exhibits break record after record. While the film is sketchy the essence of her genius is what won me almost completely over. She definitely has a pop sensibility but she refines her art to a sophisticated air that ascends into the stratosphere.”