It is not color, not decoration. It is necessity. At the Yayoi Kusama Museum, the exhibition KUSAMA’S POP explores one of the most recognizable yet misunderstood aspects of Yayoi Kusama: the relationship between repetition, consumption and identity. The exhibition begins with an implicit question: why is Kusama’s work called “pop”? The answer leads back to the 1960s, when she engaged with the New York art scene and mass culture imagery. Yet rather than adopting Pop Art as a celebration of industrial images, Kusama transformed it from within, turning repetition into an obsessive and deeply personal act. The selected works make this tension visible. Collages composed of identical printed materials saturate the visual field until it becomes unstable. They do not depict consumption - they enact it. Likewise, sculptures incorporating everyday objects merge mass-produced elements with Kusama’s inner compulsions. This shift marks a crucial difference. While Western pop often maintains a distance between viewer and image, Kusama removes that separation. Repetition, pattern and proliferation do not create recognition but disorientation. It is what she described as self-obliteration - a process in which the self dissolves into the space it produces. The exhibition builds on this ambiguity. Color, seemingly immediate, becomes a threshold leading elsewhere, where visual pleasure coexists with unease. There is no lightness, but accumulation. No irony, but necessity. Within the museum - a space entirely dedicated to her work, organized through timed entries and controlled flows - the experience becomes even more concentrated. The viewer does not simply encounter artworks, but enters a closed system where repetition is not only a theme, but a condition.
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