New book ‘Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons’ from Factory International.

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is renowned and adored for her surreal world of dots, pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms.

The Japanese artist’s pioneering career spans seven decades and she is now a global phenomenon. Her hallucinatory paintings, sculptures, and immersive environments invite us to join her very personal artistic investigation into the big cosmic questions of human existence.

This is the first ever publication dedicated to the artist’s inflatable artworks – her fantastical large-scale balloon environments (1996 ongoing) that appear to defy gravity and that beguilingly play with our sense of space and scale, mind and body, reality and illusion.

Richly illustrated, with a new essay by poet and critic Akira Tatehata; a new interview with Yayoi Kusama about her ‘balloons’; a new conversation between psychotherapist Philippa Perry and neuroscientist Professor Anil Seth about Kusama’s perceptual magic; and a complete illustrated history of Kusama’s inflatable artworks.

The book also features an updated text by curators Seungduk Kim and Franck Gautherot on a magical decade working with Kusama and her inflatables; and a comprehensive illustrated artist biography including images and ephemera from Kusama’s archive.

Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons’, Jun 30 – 28 Aug 2023, the first exhibition at the UK’s most ambitious new cultural venue, Factory International, Manchester, UK.

All images courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro and Copyright of YAYOIKUSAMA.