Японская художница Яёи Кусама подверглась критике за расистские высказывания о чернокожих людях

WHEN YAYOI Kusama died, I commented underneath one of the many tributes appearing online that, alongside celebrating an undoubtedly extraordinary artistic career, we should probably acknowledge her long and well-documented history of writing about Black people in racist, dehumanising and fetishising terms. What surprised me was not that people disagreed, but that so many people simply had no idea what I was talking about. These were not people entirely removed from contemporary art, and Kusama was hardly an obscure artist whose biography required specialist knowledge. She became one of the most recognisable artists on the planet, her pumpkins, polka dots and mirrored rooms appearing across museums, fashion collaborations, public sculpture and an enormous ecosystem of merchandise. In Britain especially, Tate helped turn the experience of Kusama into something approaching a cultural phenomenon, with Infinity Mirror Rooms eventually attracting 713,000 visitors and becoming the most successful and profitable exhibition in Tate’s history. Yet somehow, while millions of us became intimately familiar with Kusama’s visual language, considerably fewer became familiar with the language she used to describe Black people on a regular basis. There is little ambiguity in the writing itself. Recalling Black participants in sexual encounters in New York, Kusama wrote of “the darkly glistening skin, the distinctive smell, and the animalistic techniques”. Before travelling to America, she imagined the country partly through an image of a Black child she had encountered in a book, picturing “strange, barefooted children and virgin primeval forests”. Her 1971 play Tokyo Lee described its only Black character as a “WILD-looking, hairy, coal-black savage”, while the Japanese edition of her autobiography Infinity Net described her former Greenwich Village neighbourhood becoming a “slum”, with “black people shooting each other out front”. That final sentence was subsequently absent from the English translation. These are not comments reconstructed through hearsay or extracted from some forgotten private correspondence. They appeared in Kusama’s published writing across decades, repeatedly positioning Black people as primitive, hypersexual, dangerous, animalistic or exotic, and yet they remained remarkably peripheral to the public understanding of an artist whose life story was otherwise told to us endlessly. Writer and filmmaker Dexter Thomas has done perhaps more than anyone to bring this history into wider public view, documenting not only Kusama’s writing but the strange process through which parts of it appeared to have been sanitised for Western audiences. Thomas also drew attention to the way unnamed Black men appear within Kusama’s imagery, including photographs in which their bodies operate almost as props within the construction of her own artistic persona. In the original Japanese text accompanying one such image, Kusama referred to the man not as a collaborator or participant but as “The head of this Negro”. Thomas has also written about being unexpectedly banned from Kusama’s studio in 2017 and his suspicion that race may have played a part. The disappearance of the Greenwich Village passage from the English-language edition of Infinity Net feels particularly important because it shifts the conversation away from the familiar and often tedious question of whether we can separate the art from the artist. A more interesting question might be whether that separation has already been performed on our behalf, through the careful construction of an artist’s public mythology and the quiet removal, minimisation or neglect of whatever might make that mythology harder to sell. The contemporary art economy does not simply sell artworks; it sells artists, complete with biographies, struggles, breakthroughs, personalities and origin stories that help turn cultural importance into financial value. Kusama’s story became exceptionally powerful in this respect: the Japanese outsider arriving in New York, the woman struggling for recognition within a male-dominated avant-garde, the artist transforming psychological distress into an extraordinary visual universe of repetition, infinity, colour and love. None of this is necessarily untrue, but it is a remarkably compelling and commercially useful story, and the racism sits very awkwardly within it. That awkwardness matters when an enormous financial infrastructure has developed around maintaining an artist’s desirability. Museums need visitors, galleries need collectors, auction houses need confidence, publishers need books, estates need relevance and luxury brands need cultural credibility, while the artist at the centre of all of this simultaneously becomes a historical figure, an intellectual proposition and a commercial product. Once someone reaches Kusama’s level of cultural recognition, there are considerable incentives to keep the story simple. This does not require us to imagine museum directors meeting in smoke-filled rooms and agreeing to suppress uncomfortable information. In fact, the reality is potentially more troubling because it can happen without anything resembling a conspiracy. Reputation is produced through selection: one part of an artist’s biography appears repeatedly in wall texts, catalogues, press releases, documentaries and interviews, while another is mentioned occasionally, buried within scholarship or simply left out. Certain quotations become canonical and certain stories are repeated so frequently that eventually the edited version becomes the biography itself. This is why the British context deserves particular scrutiny. Tate Modern in particular has been instrumental in cementing Kusama’s extraordinary popularity here, while Infinity Mirror Rooms demonstrated precisely how valuable an artist can become to an institution, generating hundreds of thousands of visitors, enormous demand and the accompanying ecosystem of ticket sales, memberships, merchandise and publicity. None of this proves that Tate deliberately concealed Kusama’s racism, and it would be irresponsible to claim that it does, but it does make the relative absence of this history from the mainstream institutional presentation of her work worth interrogating. It was certainly an issue raised to then Director Maria Balshaw by staff on numerous occasions. I was one of the staff who raised it. When renewed attention around Kusama’s writing emerged ahead of her 2023 SFMOMA exhibition, she apologised, saying that she “deeply regret[ted] using hurtful and offensive language” in her book. SFMOMA also acknowledged the issue and developed programming around the difficult question of how museums should present artists whose histories contain racism or other forms of harm. Perhaps most revealingly, the museum’s director said that when SFMOMA originally committed to the exhibition, he had not personally known about Kusama’s racist writing. There is something extraordinary about that admission. One of the most important museums in America could prepare an exhibition by one of the most famous artists alive while its director remained unaware of published racist writing that researchers and journalists had already documented. Rather than simply asking why he did not know, we might ask what kind of cultural machinery allows information about an artist’s life to travel everywhere while other information barely travels at all. Kusama is obviously not unique in this respect. Art history is full of abusive men, racists, misogynists and artists whose behaviour becomes strangely less prominent as the monetary value of their work increases. Cultural institutions have also become extremely fluent in the language of diversity, decolonisation and anti-racism, particularly in Britain over the past decade, yet that language can become considerably more cautious when difficult questions concern the artists capable of generating queues around the building. I do not think the answer is to remove Kusama from museums or pretend that her racism somehow erases her artistic importance. If anything, doing so would reproduce the same simplistic approach from the opposite direction, replacing one sanitised biography with another. Kusama can be both a profoundly important artist and someone who repeatedly represented Black people through racist stereotypes, and an institution genuinely committed to critical engagement should be capable of holding those realities together. What concerns me is that for decades only one of them seemed to travel. We knew about the dots, the pumpkins and the mirrored rooms, just as we knew the carefully repeated story of the outsider, the visionary and the woman who transformed trauma into an artistic language of infinity and universal connection. What many people apparently did not know was that the same artist repeatedly imagined Blackness through the language of primitivism, hypersexuality and violence, despite those words sitting in published texts available for anyone sufficiently interested to find. Perhaps the uncomfortable lesson is not simply that the art world can cover things up, because “cover-up” implies an easily identifiable decision and someone consciously hiding the evidence. The art market has developed something far more sophisticated than that: an ecosystem capable of deciding which parts of an artist become culturally visible and which remain inconveniently obscure, while allowing everyone involved to claim that the information was available all along. When millions of pounds, hundreds of thousands of visitors and the reputations of major cultural institutions become attached to an artist, perhaps we should become much more interested in the parts of their story we are not being told.