Covered in a sea of eyes, Yayoi Kusama’s Meditation both peers out at the viewer and draws one into its shifting inner depths. Executed in 2008, the present work reflects Kusama’s continued investigation of the compulsive nature of her being and the quasi-psychedelic manner in which she is able to publicly relate her experiences through painting. She traces the roots of her distinctive repetitive style back to her traumatic childhood when she began to experience a specific series of hallucinations. As Kusama recalled, “when I was a child, one day I was walking the field, then all of a sudden, the sky became bright over the mountains, and I saw clearly the very image I was about to paint appear in the sky. I also saw violets which I was painting multiply to cover the doors, windows and even my body. It was then I learned the idea of self-obliteration. I immediately transferred the idea onto a canvas. It was hallucination only the mentally ill can experience” (Yayoi Kusama, quoted in Yayoi Kusama Now, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1998, p. 15).

The repeated motifs of simplified eyes and cilia-like forms in Meditation can be traced back to earlier works in Kusama’s oeuvre and became even more prevalent in her recurring visual vocabulary in the years to follow. The jagged border of triangular shapes that rings the vivid red surface destabilizes the regularity of the square canvas, an effect that is enhanced by the unbalanced, swirling army of red eyes in the interior of the composition. According to Japanese folk tradition, red is the color best suited for expelling demons and illness. Similarly, the motif of the eye has been utilized for millennia as a powerful talisman to protect and preserve one from both physical and spiritual harm, and is further associated with the ever-present paranoia of one afflicted with mental illness. Though its title seemingly implies a sense of serenity, Meditation instead manifests Kusama’s obsessive modus operandi with its ocular repetition depicted in her unique artistic language, assuming both a protective quality and one of ominous paranoia.