Artist: Yayoi Kusama is an influential Japanese pop artist. She has inspired many famous artists including Andy Warhol and greatly impacted the pop art movement in general. She was born in 1929 in Nagano, Japan. Growing up in Japan, Kusama did not agree with the strict Japanese style of art that they were taught in art school and moved to the United States to further pursue art. Her art developed a distinctive style with themes of feminism, abstraction, minimalism, and surrealism. Kusama dealt with psychological and sexual content in her work as it related to her own life.
Work: I selected High Heels by Yayoi Kusama from 1999 because it was very simple yet invoked a lot of different emotions. In terms of composition, the background has very grainy quality and the lines are not well defined, but the subject (the shoes) have a quite distinct outline. The colors are very simple, there are only three of them. The blue and red of the background are dull and the yellow of the shoes is comparatively vibrant. Overall, the tone of this artwork is quite dark, or maybe just dull. Based on placement and color, the focus of the work seems to be the shoes.
Approach: In order to recreate this work, I dissected it into two main parts. I saw the dull background of blue and red as one part, and the comparatively bright yellow shoes as another part. I think that Kusama was trying to convey a message about femininity with her original work and applied it to today’s trends of what is considered feminine and what is not. The background was somewhat arbitrary as long as it matched the aesthetic of the original work: to be relatively dull compared to the subject of the artwork. The shoes I chose to be bright yellow Birkenstocks in place of the high heels of the original piece.
Product: I recreated this work with an app that lets you cut and paste different parts of a photo and overlay it with other photos. I chose a background which was similar to the original one, where red and blue are patterned but quite dull. I chose the shoes that I did to be the focus of the work because nowadays they are considered to be feminine shoes, but are more unisex than the high heels of the original work which represents the changing attitude towards the intense distinction between the genders. So essentially in terms of approach, I deconstructed the work into two pieces: background and focus, and reconstructed with different pieces to create the digital artwork.
Reflection: In terms of creating the digital artwork once I had a clear idea of what I was going to do, it was not very difficult. I just found pictures of what I had in mind online and cut out the shape of the focus of the work (the shoes) individually and positioned them over the background, which I color-adjusted to more closely match that of Kusama’s original work. Visually I feel like I accurately represented the original work by contrasting the yellow shoes against a dull background, and the imperfect positioning of the shoes stays true to the original work as well. I learned to deconstruct a piece of art and to reconstruct it with my own interpretation. One thing I could have done differently is to reconstruct using high heels, which would have possibly been more true to the original artwork.
