Profiling Yayoi Kusama

 

An in-depth interview by BOMB Magazine, in December 1999, with one of Japan’s most famous – as well as notorious – artists who spends most of her life in a mental hospital, creating her masterpieces while struggling with her constant illnesses.

Click the link here to read the full version.

 

Excerpt:

 

GT You say your art is an expression of your mental illness. How so?

YK My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though.

GT Let’s talk about your youth and the art you made before coming to New York. You were born in Matsumoto, a medium-sized city in central Japan, in 1929. The war did not greatly affect your family as Matsumoto was fairly isolated and your family was wealthy. Is that true?

YK Our house escaped damage during the war and our storehouse was full of foodstuffs so we had enough to eat, fortunately. Yes, my family is quite wealthy. They operate real estate and storage businesses. They also wholesale seeds harvested from the plants grown on their large farms. They have been in this business for some 100 years.

Carl Jung and human nature

 

A 1959 BBC interview with one of the history’s most respected psychologists, Carl Jung, about human nature and our personality.

Interview with a cannibal

 

 

A bizarre interview with Issei Sagawa, a notorious Japanese cannibal. Read the full interview on Vice.

And here’s his little profile, as excerpted from the website:

On the afternoon of June 12, 1981, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked into the woods in Bois de Boulogne, France, carrying two suitcases. The postgraduate student at the Sorbonne had shot and killed a female exchange student, a classmate of his, the day before. After eating portions of her body, he tried to dump the corpse in a remote lake. Witnesses saw him and he was soon arrested. According to reports, Issei uttered the following to the French police who raided his home: “I killed her to eat her flesh.”

French psychologists found Sagawa to have been legally insane at the time of the crime and, therefore, unfit to stand trial. He was subsequently exempted from prosecution. He returned to his homeland, where Japanese authorities tried to put him on trial for murder. French justice officials refused to hand over the necessary documents to carry on and he was again set free.

Zach Galifianakis Presents: Spanking Justin Bieber

Now I’m still wondering why this ‘punk kid’ wanted to sign up for this self-humiliating ‘interview’.

‘Hollywood is dead.’

NB: the interview was actually outdated (conducted in January 2013). But never mind the date, as it gave deeper insight about what’s in a filmmaker’s mind when it came to describing Hollywood, as it isn’t as easy as it is.

Excerpt from Vulture:

Steven Soderbergh (pictured above) has directed 26 films since his 1989 debut, sex, lies, and videotape — the behind-closed-doors portrait of yuppie Louisiana often credited with kick-starting the indie-film revolution of the nineties, released when he was only 26. In the 24 years since, he’s been a remarkably prolific chameleon, managing arguably more than any other director of his generation to successfully bounce between the low- and high-budget, not only directing but often editing and shooting his own films, each, in its way, an audacious experiment. In one extraordinary three-year streak — 1998 to 2001 — he directed two noirish classics (Out of Sight, The Limey), pulled an Oscar performance out of Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich), earned an Oscar of his own (Traffic, the same year he was also nominated for Brockovich), and launched a lucrative franchise (Ocean’s Eleven, followed by Twelve and Thirteen). Then in 2011, the seemingly abrupt ­announcement: He wanted to be done making movies by the time he was 50, to focus on painting, among many other things.

Read the full interview here.