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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Yayoi Kusama’s novels and poetry as an integral part of her artistic practice. It argues that writing functioned as an intermedial continuation of her performances and installations, translating visual strategies of repetition, excess, and dissent into language.

Paper long abstract

Yayoi Kusama is internationally recognized as a leading figure of postwar and contemporary visual art. Alongside her installations, sculptures, and performances, however, she has also produced an extensive body of literary work, including novels, prose fragments, manifestos, and poetry that she continues to publish today. This paper argues that Kusama’s writing should be understood as an integral component of her artistic practice, rather than as a secondary or explanatory supplement to her visual work.

Focusing on the period from her New York years (1958–1973) to her post-return activity in Japan, I examine how Kusama’s artistic strategies migrated across media. In New York, her public happenings and body-based actions developed in close dialogue with anti-war activism, feminist movements, and queer visibility. After her return to Japan in the late 1970s, literature became a new site where comparable artistic concerns could be articulated under different institutional conditions. Writing did not replace visual practice but operated alongside it, extending its conceptual and formal logic.

Through close analysis of Manhattan Suicide Addict (1978) and The Hustlers’ Grotto of Christopher Street (1983), together with selected poems from different stages of Kusama’s career, this paper demonstrates how her writing adopts visual and performative principles such as repetition, seriality, fragmentation, and bodily excess. In prose, these elements produce unstable narrative structures that resist closure and coherence. In poetry, they appear as rhythmic insistence and condensed verbal repetition, creating a linguistic analogue to the spatial and temporal experience of her installations.

Methodologically, the paper situates Kusama’s literary production within art-historical discussions of intermediality, performance, and postwar avant-garde practices. By reading writing as a form of artistic action, it reframes Kusama’s oeuvre as a continuous field in which image, body, and language operate through shared strategies. This perspective allows us to reconsider how visual artists use text not merely as documentation or commentary, but as a material and performative medium in its own right.

Keywords: Yayoi Kusama; visual art; performance; poetry; postwar avant-garde; gender, contemporary art