Yayoi Kusama: I Who Have Arrived in Heaven

Yayoi Kusama: I Who Have Arrived in Heaven features new work from the artist's critically acclaimed 2013 inaugural exhibition at David Zwirner, which spanned the gallery's three locations in New York. Kusama's extraordinary and highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design and interventions within existing architectural structures.

Opening this book is a series of exquisitely produced color plates of brightly colored, large-format square paintings. Part of a recent body of work, they allude to universal spheres or basic life forms and highlight Kusama's unique amalgamation of representational and nonrepresentational subject matter.

Other works featured include the video installation, Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, in which the artist herself is seen performing a song she composed while an animated slideshow of selected artworks moves behind her, and the two mirrored infinity rooms, Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away and Love Is Calling. The works exemplify the vitality of Kusama's optical environments, which become hypnotic and self-referential, merging concepts of flatness and depth, presence and absence, transience and permanence, and finiteness and infinity.

Text by Akira Tatehata, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, and President of Kyoto City University of Arts.