You may remember my excitement over the Yayoi Kusama/Lancôme collaboration a few years back. Little did I know the artist also created an even more gorgeous Juicy Tube collection called Awakening of Love late in 2011. (I stumbled across it while hunting down the Once Upon a Week Juicy Tubes on E-bay). From what I understand Awakening of Love was exclusive to Australia, and I was only able to get my hands on one of the six glosses in the collection.
This is Baba Jasmine.
Other shades in the lineup include Crazy Yuzu, Vigorous Fruit, Exotic Bomb, Yoga Vanilla and Peace and Flowers. Upon first glance the designs seem just plain cute, but they get increasingly fascinating the more you look at them. There's a multicolored purse and blue pump surrounded by floating eyes, and a pink bird stacked on top of a yellow chirping bird. The most unusual design to me appears on the gloss I was able to buy. A sunflower with an eye for its center is anchored by an exaggerated, floppy green leaf (which I originally thought was a shoe!) against a background of wavy tendrils that end in tiny buds. All three designs incorporate Kusama's signature polka dots.
(image from anobsessionwiththefabulous.com)
About the collection, Lancôme states: "Today, reflecting the mood of her current artwork, Yayoi Kusama is
remodelling Juicy Tubes around the theme of love. She offers Lancôme’s
pop-princess gloss three unique designs that are as poetic as the most
sincere promises of eternal love." Fittingly, the title of the collection is after Kusama's 2010 work Awakening of Love.
(image from tate.org.uk)
The lines, disembodied eyes, random objects, dots and flowers seen in the Juicy Tube designs also appear in several works from 2009-2011, all of which have "love" in the title.
Look at the Gathering of Women in Search of Love, 2009:
All about My Love, and I Long to Eat a Dream of the Night, 2009:
(images from lakhimich.blogspot.com)
Love Arrives at the Earth Carrying with it a Tale of the Cosmos, 2009:
(image from a-place-called-space.blogspot.com)
Tulip With All My Love, 2011 (Remember that a tulip appeared in the earlier Juicy Tube collection):
(image from artbasel.insideguidance.com)
Of course, these motifs aren't really anything new; as they're based on hallucinations Kusama has had since her childhood, they've cropped up in many works prior to these. Flowers appeared in her 2002 sculpture The Visionary Flowers, as well as The Tulips of Shangri-La (2003) and 2007's Hymn of Life. An eye is used as a the center of a flower in Flowers that Bloom at Midnight (2009):
(image from cultureandlife.co.uk)
Indeed, these works and the Juicy Tube designs have a strange hallucinatory quality about them, along with a more upbeat feel as compared to the more menacing tone these motifs took on in her earlier work. In an essay on Flowers that Bloom at Midnight from the Queensland Arts Gallery states, "[Kusama] has grouped four of these towering flowers into an artificial
grove, their shiny surfaces, polka-dotted petals and great, staring eyes
recalling animated alien flora of science fiction and fantasy tales…Flowers have long been an important component of Kusama’s oeuvre.
Their symbolism reflects many of the artist’s conceptual preoccupations
as well as her disregard for dichotomies: they connote life and death, celebration and mourning, masculinity and
femininity, while their complex forms — organic, fragile, finding
uniqueness through repetition — find echoes throughout Kusama’s
practice. In plentiful supply thanks to her family’s nursery business,
flowers flourished in Kusama’s first reported visions, consuming entire
rooms and communicating ominously with the artist…They would remain a staple motif in the painterly
experiments of her first decade as a professional artist. Like the polka
dots, they reappeared in her ‘happenings’ of the late 1960s, in the
sympathetic environment of the anti-war counterculture, as they fitted
neatly into the context of the ‘flower power’ movement of the time.
Flowers that Bloom at Midnight finds direct precedence in a
series of outdoor sculptures Kusama has executed over the past decade.
Monumental in scale, these works consist of floral forms that are at
once simplified and fantastical, and finished in polka-dotted planes of
vivid colour. Their scale and alien appearance evokes a strange and
overwhelming power. With an air of uncanny sexuality, their comical
styling, pristine surfaces and exuberant tones are decidedly joyous,
contrasting strongly with the darker function flowers performed in her
earlier works." Additionally, I wonder whether Kusama had anything to do with the naming of the Lancôme glosses – Peace and Flowers is possibly a nod to her prolific anti-war activism in the '60s.
Anyway, I thought this collection design-wise was more interesting than the previous Juicy Tubes Kusama created. And I wish it wasn't Australia-exclusive! Lancôme seems to be withholding many of their limited-edition collections from the U.S., such as the aforementioned Once Upon a Week collection, along with the Corno collaboration from last summer.
What did you think of this? Do you prefer the older Yayoi Kusama Juicy Tube collection or this one?