#ShiftMoment
Recently I visited the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Museum Ludwig in Cologne: polka dots, Infinity Rooms, Infinity Nets — all spectacular, all moving.
What has stayed with me, though, lies deeper. Kusama's dots, reflections and rhythms are not simply an aesthetic.
They emerge from a way of perceiving the world that has accompanied the artist since childhood: hallucinations, patterns, dissolving boundaries, the sense of being seized by forms and repetitions.
Impressions we are quick to read from the outside as limitation.
But in the moment of entering her work, something else becomes real:
Kusama does not simply turn her perception into an explanation of herself. She turns it into a space for us.
She does not remain enclosed in her world. She finds a form through which we can enter it.
And suddenly something deeply personal becomes a shared experience: a space that shifts our gaze. And lets us look beyond the edge.
Perhaps design that opens something begins where a person's own perception is taken seriously enough to become accessible to others.
Not pathologised.
Not romanticised.
But translated.
What I take from it:
What changes when we stop reading apparent limitations only as an ending — and start reading them as a beginning for making the world accessible differently?