REVIEW: [Yayoi Kusama Retrospective] @ Tate Modern, London

Tate Modern recently revealed its new retrospective for the renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

"Her art has an almost hallucinatory intensity that reflects her unique vision of the world, whether through a teeming accumulation of detail or the dense patterns of polka dots that have become her signature. The incessant quality of this gesture is both obsessive and meditative.

In the late 1990s, Kusama returned to making room size installations. In her installations, this image of bourgeois stasis is turned into something surreal and uncanny. All the room and furnishing covered with sticker spots which glow. The polka dot can be the visual shorthand signifying her hallucinatory visions. Covering in a room in psychedelic polka dots might be her attempt to visualise and restage the experience of her own hallucinatory episodes, during which she senses the physical world overtaken by endlessly repeated forms. Her representation of her inner world results in an installation that is fantastical and potentially unsettling. Spots are more readily experienced as interruptions of our own field of vision rather than a surface motif.

I'm Here But Nothing (2000) by Yayoi Kusama

I'm Here But Nothing (2000) by Yayoi Kusama

Her piece 'Infinity Mirror Room' is a depiction of infinite space. Reflecting surfaces has become a recurring element in her work. Large scale environments that viewers can walk into and explore. She proposes an experience for the infinite, inviting the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self -accompanying Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration." -Tate Modern

REFERENCE: If I Can't See You, Can You Still See Me?

I am fascinated by film and books that explore into the worlds of those that may inhabit alternate realities to our own. People who have been isolated from society, blinded, mute, on a voiceless island in the midst of our world. It's a world that cannot be entered or understood by anyone other than someone who has been there. In that way, we could never imagine or possibly experience what and how they perceive the world. How it differs from our own. They are trapped in their own world, one that no one else can relate to. It's a lonely place.

Dogtooth (2009) directed by Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth (2009) directed by Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth (2009) directed by Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth is a film that explores the concept of isolation to its extreme. How people may behave and perceive their world completely differently when they are cut off from the rest of society. The film's insights are startling and haunting, a dystopian fear of a potential existence that seems terrifyingly otherworldly.

Blindness (2008) directed by Fernando Meirelles

"The only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see."

Dystopian drama has often been a subject of exploration, a window into a darker reality we hope to avoid. Our fear is in fact due to its very likeliness to become a possibility in our lives. The best kind of dystopias are the ones that don't seem too far fetched or removed, the ones that everyone may and can fear. The fact we can comprehend vaguely how it would be to live in such a space, the psychological impact is far greater. If the world around us changes, so do we.

The Diving Bell and Butterfly (2007) directed by Julian Schnabel