Research/Reading the Masters/Ⅶ Those of Today
Ⅶ — Those of Today · No. 43 / 50
Yayoi Kusama — Pumpkin
쿠사마 야요이 — 〈호박〉
A recurring series of paintings and sculptures since the 1990s, combining pumpkin forms with polka dots.
A single pumpkin stands before us. Its rounded body is covered by dots that seem equal yet subtly differ.
For Kusama, the dot is not mere decoration but a unit that dissolves the boundary of the self. Through repetition, an object loses its isolated surface and enters the same rhythm as the surrounding space.
The pumpkin is a memory from childhood and a familiar form through which anxiety can be endured. Solid, comic, and close to the ground, it remains strangely stable beneath its brilliant pattern.
Byun Shi-Ji’s surfaces also contain repeated dark marks: strokes of wind, crows, and traces of dry grass. Kusama’s dots disperse the self into the universe; Byun’s brief lines hold a being within a world that threatens to scatter.
One path disappears into infinity. The other remains before it.
The pumpkin stays close to the earth and grows as wide as the cosmos.
The interpretation is the author’s. No unverified statement has been presented as the artist’s own words.