Pumpkin is one of the important patterns in Yayoi Kusama’s work, because it issues from her personal reflection on her past during World War II, where her hometown, Matsumoto, was relatively untouched by conflict, her family’s store was always full of pumpkins. Seen from its size and shape, Kusama consistently presents the pumpkin as a representation of tension and peculiarity in the relationship between modern technology and nature. On the one hand, the pumpkin raises a connotation of a force of nature, growth, and fertility. Its gigantic size expresses a boon of nature capable of feeding all humanity.
However, on the other hand, its size and that surface covered with bright yellow color, full of large and small black dots, causes the pumpkin to look magical, as if it comes from some whimsical wonderland.
 

Location