Spotted: This side of Fifth Avenue is dotted with huge paint drip stickers, realistically rendered in the artist’s brushstrokes, touching the feet of everyone who passes by. The artist is Yayoi Kusama, commonly referred to as “the Polka Dot Princess” and one of the best-selling living female artists. These decorations are part of the Louis Vuitton collection new series of global campaigns in collaboration with Kusama.
“Is she alive? I heard the person next to me whisper to his friend in disbelief.
“Wow, she’s smiling at me…Hi!” said another viewer.
I too was drawn to the colorful Fifth Avenue sidewalk. I searched for my phone seeing the strange dots and many spectators, a little worried that I didn’t already have it in hand. I zoomed into the window frame, my attention drawn to the wrinkles on the animatronic Kusama’s face beneath the shiny red-polka dot pumpkin helmet. I watched his puffy eyelids weighing down his signature (in)expression of skepticism – the round gaze imbued with a hint of obsession that is irreducible even to his robotic facsimile. I waited for him to turn to me.
Finally, after several slow blinks, Kusama fixed his robotic gaze on me. In that split second that her gaze met mine, the certainty of her sharp pupils captured me in dawning concern. I asked myself: What am I looking at? The artist, the robot, a thing or a person? And perhaps even more intimidating: what is she looking at?
But before diving deep into the discomfort, let’s first consider the storefront.
Encased in glass on a rather plain background, the Kusama robot takes care of what’s in front of it: eight colored dots on the display case. Gesturing with a clean brush in her right hand, she points to the various dots and paints, suggestively, while her left arm clings faithfully to the Louis Vuitton and Yayoi Kusama edition of the Capucine bag. Thanks to the robotic performance of the suggestive painting, the points are transmitted on the window, before reaching us on the sidewalk.
Known for its endless psychedelic mirror halls, which invite audience immersion, this installation suggests an atypical, lonely undertone, as visitors watch Kusama’s robot stand alone in an austere and dramatic state.
Considering the fine line between animatronic and anthropomorphic, what kept me on my toes is this: how does this display of personality take possession of me, my consciousness, and my body?
I find myself uncomfortably in a collision of shame and pride. As an Asian woman myself, I feel proud to see an Asian artist being elevated to the rank of symbolic summit of the world of consumption. But I’m also ashamed to see an inflatable ginormous from the same artist crawl to the top of a flagship store in Paris. What is thrown in my face is not only the radical non-personality that Kusama is locked into, but also the precarious personality of the “yellow” woman in the Western world of signs, to begin with.
In his critical proposal Ornamentalism (2019), Anne Anlin Cheng demonstrates the particular challenge that belies the non-personality of the “yellow” woman. She took the example of the importable Alexander McQueen dress made of porcelain shards exposed to China: Through the Looking Glassa 2015 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, writes: “We are looking at a particular form of anthropomorphism or prosopopoeia in which the human is used to recall objectivity rather than the other way around,” she writes.
The very making of the “yellow” woman has always been synthetic rather than organic, part of a larger aesthetic project based on a material culture of objects and ornaments. Like the lovely blue and white vases and decorations, Asian women are known and meant to be mute and absent – a figure “so steeped in representation that she is invisible, so embedded in aesthetic expectation that… [she] does not need to be present to generate affect,” Cheng writes.
The proliferation of this aesthetic project seems to go hand in hand with an inadequate liberal critique of cultural appropriation or fetishization, which only exacerbates the invisibility of Asian women.
In a recent interview with Seduce magazinepop star Gwen Stefani has come out as ‘Japanese’ to defend her widely criticized appropriation of Japan’s Harajuku subculture for a music video, visit, and range of fragrances.
What critics of cultural appropriation against Stefani have failed to register is that she is not just about a white celebrity taking advantage of a particular cultural aesthetic, but that real girls of Harajuku, although they are used voluntarily, are always presented as accessories, decorations. The “human” challenge of being transformed into a literal perfume bottle is not the same for its Japanese interpreters – “Love”, “Angel”, “Music” and “Baby” – as is the case with Stefani. Being Japanese is not a costume you can take off. And I can’t even begin to express the fear and rage of being a cat called “Konichiwa”.
With the Louis Vuitton installation, the stereotypical Asian woman, mute and absent, is exposed to the rank of basic goods within the framework of a global marketing project, mixing the image of the artist with questions of autonomy, agency and objectivity.
The reality of Kusama’s literal confinement within the mental institution is corroborated by this animatronic artist in the showcase, where art is subordinated to the consumer market in the name of “collaboration.” While a level of her interiority is broadcast to the world, the world itself is kept away from her.
However, even given his mental state, there is a particular danger in leaving Kusama in a position of helplessness, appealing as that may be to our liberal sensibilities. The complicity of the artist’s estate in the capitalist order of monetization makes it slippery to even sympathize with its potential loss. After all, this is still a collaboration between a luxury brand and a global creative company.
Don’t get me wrong: this is not another critique of the male gaze, or even of the Western gaze. It’s a presentation of my gaze, even if I have trouble articulating it myself. I feel trapped on the other side of the mirror, unable to see through. But I see the street, splashed with points that correspond to the dominant order of the world: obligatory, reproducible, endless, inexhaustible, contagious, homogenizing and dizzying. And yet full of holes.
