A Means to Connect the Dots

With the mix of comic books and animation, robots and other electronic gizmos, candy-colored flower photographs and polka-dot balloons, it's not hard to imagine that the Kennedy Center has been turned into a visual arts toy box for its two-week "Japan! Culture + Hyperculture" festival.

The artist perhaps most representative of this youthful pop aesthetic is a 78-year-old icon of Japanese contemporary art. Known for her trademark use of colorful dots -- along with the fact that she has lived, by choice, in a private psychiatric hospital since 1975 -- Yayoi Kusama has created two site-specific, walk-in installations for the Kennedy Center's roof-level Atrium foyers. The first, called "Dots Obsession -- Day," consists of a bright yellow room decorated with black polka dots; the second, "Dots Obsession -- Night," is yellow on black. Both feature oversize balloons in lieu of furniture.

It's that style of cartoonish exaggeration that Alicia Adams, vice president of international programming at the Kennedy Center, identifies as the "hyper" part of the festival's title. It's also, she says, a quintessential expression of modern Japan, a country with one foot grounded in tradition and one keeping pace with the fast-changing world of today. Hyper, she explains, in the context of hyper-culture, means a "pulling, a popping, a blowing up" of the familiar, the recognizable. Kind of like a balloon.

Now that we've got what Kusama's installations are all about -- or at least what they look like -- how will it feel to actually enter those spaces? "Like you are wading through a giant environment of dots," says Adams, matter-of-factly. "It's actually quite soothing and comforting."

For Kusama, who has struggled in the past with hallucinations (of dots, naturally) and obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the artist's chosen motif is a form of therapy. It keeps her sane, she has said. For visitors to the Kennedy Center, the "Dots Obsession" installations are intended as a way to experience, and perhaps ultimately understand, what it's like to live inside the artist's head.

According to Adams, that may be a little disorienting. "It feels like the world is moving," she says. "Like the Earth is one of the polka dots, and so is the moon and the stars and the sun."

Sounds a bit queasy. Does she really mean moving, as in an amusement park ride, or moving, as in emotional? "Both," Adams says.

Yayoi Kusama: Dots Obsession -- Day and Dots Obsession -- Night Thursday-Feb. 17 in the North and South Atrium foyers, Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW Info:202-467-4600. http:// www.kennedy-center.org. Hours: Open daily 10 to 10. Admission: Free.