4 Personal Branding Lessons from the highest-paid female artist in the world.
Guidelines for a Timeless Brand
Guidelines for a Timeless Brand
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is sometimes called ‘the princess of polka dots’.
Although she makes lots of different types of art — paintings, sculptures, performances and installations — they have one thing in common, DOTS!
You see, artists have a fate of being poor or forgotten. Even Van Gogh became famous after his suicide.
But Yayoi Kusama refused to have that fate. She created a Personal Brand so strong that it
Gets her recognition
And makes her the highest-paid female artist in the world
And now we are going to dive into her paintings and lessons of personal branding that you can use for your own brand.
You might wonder, I am not an artist so how that’s relevant to me?
Every writer, creator & innovator is an artist when they aim to create something which is bigger than themselves.
So if you find yourself in any of these buckets. These lessons will be relevant to you.
1. Know your Origin Story
Yayoi was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan. From an early age had a strong instinct for what she wanted to do with her life.
She used to paint all the time. But her parents didn’t want her to be an artist.
So when her mother tore up her drawings, she made more.
When she couldn’t afford to buy art material, she used mud to make art.
Her early home was not easy to live. Yayoi’s father would openly have affairs with other women and her mother would send her to spy on him and when she would report back what she saw, her mother would often beat her in anger.
Now her parents who had no control of their own emotions and their own life were against the idea of making art as a career and instead wanted her to marry into a family of affluence.
So when Yayoi disagreed, her mother gave her an ultimatum that if you want to paint don’t come back.
Yayoi was also dealing with mental illness so her psychiatrist at the time urged her to travel to America, advising that maybe the best move for her is to move out and be on her own.
And one of her favorite artists was the American modernist Georgia O’Keefe, Yayoi wrote her a letter seeking advice on how to become a recognized artist. You can think of it as her way of cold emailing.
O’Keefe replied saying, ‘in this country an artist has a hard time making a living. You will have to find your way as best as you can but I wish the very best for you.’
Before leaving she burned up 2000 paintings by the riverside. This was her way of washing the slate clean and starting afresh.
She committed herself to painting better works.
This is a drawing she made of her mum when she was 10-years-old. You can see the Dots here as well.
And these Dots have a story of their own.
When Yayoi was a little she had a hallucination that freaked her out.
She was in a field of flowers when they all started talking to her! The heads of flowers were like dots that went on as far as she could see, and she felt as if she was disappearing or as she calls it ‘self-obliterating’ — into this field of endless dots.
This experience had such a strong influence on her that she had a consistent theme of infinity and self-obliteration in her artworks.
For her, dots are symbols of the world, the cosmos. The Earth is a dot, the moon, the sun, the stars, all are made up of dots.
You and me, we are dots.
But why did I tell you her life story? What has to be with Personal Branding?
Well a big part of expressing yourself comes from who you truly are and where you come from & your childhood plays a huge role in that.
We all have an origin story, one that tells people:
who we are
why we do what we do
And, what we have to offer.
Think of your life as a movie and you will start finding the plot that’s filled with sub plots, obstacles, turning points, the climax.
And write as if you are the author of a story, which is your story.
So what happens to you in the movie?
What’s your personality like?
What are your values, that makes you take actions?
Personal Branding is meant for you to set the narrative that you want, before anyone else does it for you or before your work gets forgotten.
2. Stand out and be Noticeable
In 1958, when Yayoi moved to NYC, it had become the center of the art world. But it was a male dominated space where women rarely had solo shows and had to fight their way into the galleries.
So how did she stand out?
Well in the beginning, she dressed just in modern fashion, wearing what was expected for that time.
But she quickly realized that blending in wasn’t going to get her what she wants.
She needed to stand out against the grey cement sidewalks and steel buildings in NYC.
So she started setting herself apart by using the silk in vibrant colors for culture.
She started wearing a traditional Japanese kimono.
She understood the rule of attention — Better to be seen than ignored.
Attention would be enable her to meet potential buyers, dealers and individuals with influence and lead her to more shows and eventually solo shows.
Because she sure as hell didn’t travel all the way to New York just to fade in the background.
Just like her reimagined vigor, her artwork also started to take on new forms.
One of her artworks was The Infinity nets.
They were large canvases with a solid background filled in through a series of brush Strokes that connected each other like a net.
They express an idea of connectedness in the in the infinite space.
Yayoi isn’t afraid of taking space. One of the net paintings was 33 feet long.
Along with elevating her craft the publicity of her work and her performance art was always on her mind.
you can see this in her soft sculpture work, the boat chairs, couches covered in soft sculpture have the same obsessive quaility as the net painting.
For one show called ‘Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show’ Yayoi created a unique insulation by taking pictures of the boat and projecting it onto the walls, floors and ceilings.
It not only brought the viewers into one piece of art but into an entire experience.
Another example is the unauthorized ‘Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA’
MoMA is the Museum of Modern Art
Yayoi instructed new performers to dance around the naked sculptures by deceased artists.
She wanted to make a statement believing that the MoMA favored dead artists over the living and that for an institution that prided itself on being modern, there was nothing modern to be found.
The museum shut down the happening and the press quickly picked up the story and she got the publicity she desired.
Attention is a form of currency in personal branding.
‘Everything is judged by its appearance, what is unseen counts for nothing.’
— Robert Greene
So never let yourself get lost in the crowd or buried in Oblivion.
Stand out and be noticeable at all costs.
3. Create a Timeless Theme
Most artists that made their mark in history is by literally a mark, the mark could be —
a consistent theme
a consistent style
a consistent perspective
It could be any of these things. But it has to be something that speaks to them. Something that helps them express a huge part of themselves.
For Yayoi:
Her consistent theme — Infinity
Her consistent style — Polka Dots
Her consistent perspective — Self Obliteration
Self-obliteration implies that in order to enter the ‘infinite’ universe, people have to forget their physical body and selfhood, and become one with their surroundings and nature.
And you could just see it happening with the experiences that she creates for people.
Now you might be wondering, how could you have a consistent perspective and theme all your life?
Didn’t she evolve with time?
Of course she did.
You see, we all have a central theme in our life, that keeps surfacing again and again.
If you just think back, you will find some of the central themes that have stood out time and again for you.
Try to window down the theme and emotion to one word.
Something that’s Universal.
Something so constant that as long as humans are present in this world, the word will be there too.
Words like power, love, obsession, creation, innovation, envy, rebellion are here to stay and always did.
You can think of them as immortal themes.
4. World Building
World building is about creating an environment that is bigger than just one person, bigger than the Creator, bigger than the artist.
This is something that Yayoi did better than anyone, she led people into a world and surrounded them with her work.
She allowed them to feel what it was like to be inside of the art and to not just look at it.
World building is an act of vulnerability as you need to let people in and show them around the space you built.
And when you are inviting people in you also have to think about what you are inviting people into and what they are escaping from.
Yayoi had mastered this craft, she didn’t just bring art to the people, she made it about people.
In 1996, she traveled to Italy and displayed her famous Narcissus Garden.
She arranged 1500 mirror balls, think of them as mirrored polka dots in front of the Italian Pavilion, she displayed a sign that read, ‘Your Narcissism for Sale’
She even offered to sell the balls to the visitors for $2 each.
Yayoi’s goal was to engage viewers and critique the commercialism of the art world.
Today, Yayoi Kusama is the most expensive living female artist in the world.
Her early works get sold for over 15 million in auctions.
Ultimately branding is just an active discovery of finding the story that fits the person and Yayoi was nailing the game during her time in New York.
Thanks for Reading!
Until next time.
Here’s something about me —
I love digging into history, the human psyche and business. And then write about them from a nuanced perspective.
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