Yayoi Kusama, one of the most prolific avant-garde Japanese artists, is set to open her own museum in Bentencho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo and the museum will open to the public on October 1, 2017, according to a Japanese press release. 

Called Yayoi Kusama Museum, the five-story building was designed by Japanese architecture firm Kume Sekkei and completed in 2014. The museum building features curved lines and large glass windows with an intermittent form. Since its opening, no one could understand the exact function of the building and the artist has kept the building's secrecy until now. 

The Yayoi Kusama Museum will now serve as Kusama's personal venue dedicated to her works and installations. The museum is aimed to promote the dissemination of the art and to contribute to the development of the art in general, and the Yayoi Kusama Memorial Arts Foundation will be responsible for this operation.

The Yayoi Kusama Museum was designed by Kume Sekkei. Image © Masahiro Tsuchido, courtesy of Yayoi Kusama

Tensei Tatebata, president of Tama Art University and director of the Saitama Museum of Modern Art, will be the director of the museum. The lantern-like museum's ground floor will consists of shops and entrance functions. 

The second and third floors of the building will serve as exhibitions rooms for Kusama's well-known dotted installations, while the fifth floor serving as a reading room, archive for Kusama's works. The museum will also have an outdoor space for the artists' outdoor installations.

To celebrate the opening, the Yayoi Kusama Museum will held its first exhibition titled "Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What Brings You Closer to Art" from Yayoi Kusama's latest painting series "My eternal soul" - featuring her recent paintings of eyes, faces and other organic forms, opened in Victoria Miro Gallery in 2016. The museum's first exhibition will be on view between October 1, 2017 - February 25, 2018. 

The museum will open on October 1, and presented with timed tickets priced at ¥1,000 ($7.08), which go on sale August 28, 2017. 

Yayoi Kusama, 88, was born in Nagano Prefecture and named as avant-garde sculptor, painter and novelist. Kusama was always keen on dotted, pointed figures since her childhood. She started to paint using polka dots and nets as motifs at around age ten, and created fantastic paintings in watercolors, pastels and oils.

Las year, the artist filled Philip Johnson’s Glass House with red polka dots and gave life again to this modernist house. Kusama's ''In Infinity'' was exhibited  at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.  

Top image © Yayoi Kusama

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