How to Disappear Completely: Cinematic Explorations of Self-Obliteration in Yayoi Kusama’s Experimental Film Works Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967) and Flower Obsession Sunflower (2000)
By Libertad Gills
Yayoi Kusama is soon to become a household name. Like Marina Abramovich or Jackson Pollock, if it doesn’t already, one day her name will just roll off your tongue.
The Beyeler Foundation has recently opened the first major retrospective of the renowned Japanese artist’s work in Switzerland, who is 96 years old. The exhibition will next travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (14 March 2026-2 August 2026) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (11 September 2026-17 January 2027). Organized in close collaboration with Kusama and her studio, the exhibition features many of her most iconic works, and also features works never before seen in Europe, including several pieces from her personal collection. One comes away from the exhibition understanding Kusama as a total artist, much more than the polka dots that she is known for. She is primarily known as a painter, sculptor and environmentalist, but her work spans across many other forms, including collage, fashion design, fiction, poetry, and film and video. In this text we’ll look at two of her experimental moving image works from the artist’s collection, namely Kusama’s Self-Obliteration and Flower Obsession Sunflower from 1967 and 2000, respectively. Both works are included in the Beyeler exhibition.
Shot on 16mm color film and transferred to digital video, the award-winning 23-minute-long happening film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967) is a collective work, made in collaboration with the late experimental New York filmmaker Jud Yalkut (who also collaborated with the video artist Nam June Paik, the filmmaker Aldo Tambellini, and the dancer Trisha Brown, among others), responsible for the film’s photography and editing, with an original score by the San Francisco band Citizens for Interplanetary Activity (credited as C.I.A. Change) with “liquid sounds” by Aurora Glory Alice. Kusama is the main performer in the film as well as credited for the film’s scenario and art direction. The film explores the theme which accompanies the majority of Kusama’s work – “Self-Obliteration” – defined by the artist as the feeling of losing the boundaries between the self and the other through the obsessive repetition and proliferation of a single motif, in this case, the polka dot. Kusama’s conceptual focus and Yalkut’s filmmaking style are well-matched. Through the repetitive use of quick zoom-ins and outs, as well as in-camera slow motion, fast-forward, superimpositions, and multiple dissolves, the film explores Kusama’s interior world, as she covers animals and men, a tree, a lake, a stone wall, in her white and red polka dots. Yalkut’s camera follows Kusama’s hand as she obsessively works/plays, emphasizing the artist’s distinct look of long black hair and beautifully-crafted outfits. Hypnotic and trance-inducing, the film ends with an orgiastic dance scene filmed in the psychedelic style of the 1960s. Polka dots are both physical and liquid, cinematographically uniting both the material and natural worlds. The film won a prize at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium, and second prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, both in 1968.
Flower Obsession Sunflower (2000) is a work shot on video with a duration of 2 minutes and 40 seconds. In it, Kusama submerges herself in a field of sunflowers, under a bright blue sky. She poses next to the flowers, under the flowers, touching the flowers, and plucking out the dot-shaped disc florets (internal flower petals) that make up the flower’s center. She looks often at the camera, with a Mona Lisa smile, knowingly, seriously, mischievously. Although shot digitally, the film employs many of the techniques used in Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, including dissolves and fast-forwarding. While in the previous film Kusama was almost 40, in this film she is in her 70s, and more clearly associates the concept of self-obliteration with the fact of death, as her still body, eyes closed, harmonizes within its surroundings, becoming one with the ground that sustains her.
Thirty years apart, both works explore the theme of self-obliteration in different ways. In 1967, Kusama self-obliterates into dots, taking her friends, cat, and surroundings with her, while in 2000, her body succumbs into a bed of flowers, alone. Both convey playfulness, of an artist who first creates a world and then becomes one with it, at peace within a repetitive backdrop. The very strong presence of the artist, whose hair, dress, and style make her stand out rather than blend-in, is stripped away in a process of covering and uncovering, in which the individual ego and the spirit of the natural world finally become one.
Self-Obliteration is not only a theme in her artwork, but also in her particular way of living the artist’s life. In fact, she destroyed many of her early works before leaving Japan for the United States in 1957, aiming to create greater ones abroad. Another expression of self-obliteration is the way that she erased boundaries between the various media she used, by painting over drawings, reworking them into collages, and combining painting and sculpture to create her full-scale interactive works. This is also visualized in Kusama’s Self-Obliteration when her painted red polka dots seem to materialize off the canvas, floating away in the water.
The Beyeler Foundation exhibitions includes a letter from November 15, 1955 that Kusama wrote to Georgia O’Keefe -who she had never met- asking her for guidance. This began a decades-long correspondence. Kusama felt akin to the artist who was her senior by more than four decades. She writes, “I have the most sympathetic or common feeling in your paintings. Though I feel so I am very far away from where you are and only on the first step of long difficult life of painter. I should ask you would kindly show me the way to approach this life”. Only 26 at the time, Kusama is already aware that the life of a painter will not be an easy one. She sent the letter along with two watercolor paintings. O’Keefe responded only days later, encouraging Kusama to move to New York which Kusama did two years later.
Like Kusama, O’Keefe also self-obliterated, in a sense, into her flowers and desert landscapes. She was known to paint the same object over and over again, until she had penetrated it completely. Her name today is synonymous with the roses, petunias, irises, and jimsonweeds that she mastered in painting. Few might recognize O’Keefe in a crowd. Kusama’s version of self-obliteration, however, has not managed to obliterate her identity in the same way. After all, she is an artist of a different time, one in which social media presence seems essential to the commercial success of an artist. But even prior to social media, from an image of her studio door in New York in the 1960s in which her name is painted across in huge white letters, we see that her signature was already part of her artistic expression. And today, some may not recognize her paintings, but they have certainly seen her face. And, of course, the dots.
Kusama has become her dots; she has self-obliterated into them. There is a commercialization of this pattern which is so easily transformed into handkerchiefs, dresses, skirts. In fact, many of the women visiting the exhibit wore colorful or black and white dots in celebration of the artist. And the museum’s gift shop is filled with dot-themed clothing, bags, and socks. In a way, these visitors/fans in camouflaging themselves into Kusama’s dots are also engaging in the practice of self-obliteration, becoming a part of the artist’s world. Perhaps this is the most impressive aspect of all, the ability few artists have to invite others into the world that they have created. Seen in this light, the moving image works are invitations in which Kusama casts a spell and beckons her viewers into her universe. But while we temporarily inhabit the space she has created, Kusama lives in it. It is not a backdrop; to her, it is everything. As an externalized visualization of her internal world, Kusama’s dots and flowers are what she is made of. Self-Obliteration then, is not a becoming, but a homecoming, a return to the meadows and greenhouses of her childhood spent in her family’s seed nursery in Matsumoto, Japan. Having left these things behind in 1957, perhaps these works are a way for her to carry her past with her, in the process of migrating and creating her life as an artist in a new country (which she returned to permanently in 1973). What’s beautiful is that people in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and everywhere else her work travels to, can join her in the dots, albeit momentarily, separating themselves from their own reality and temporarily living in Kusama’s world.
*All photos taken by the author.