At a glance, besuited 61-year-old Daisuke Miyatsu looks like a lot of Japanese salarymen, the country’s term for its white-collar class, often depicted as workaholics. But 30 years ago, the office worker saved hard for a Yayoi Kusama artwork he just had to have and made a sharp turn, becoming an art collector, then a professor at Yokohama College of Art and Design.
Miyatsu’s love for art began in kindergarten. His art-loving grandmother would take him to museums and galleries, where he developed his eye. Then, as a university student, he attended a collection show at a Tokyo museum, where he encountered one of Kusama’s dazzling Infinity Nets paintings.
“That is a very unforgettable experience,” he recalls. “I stand at the front of her painting. I can see that the painting is a painting, but it looks like it’s moving by itself – optical magic. I’m just standing at the front of the painting where I am entering another world, like a very different kind of universe. So that is the starting point falling in love with Yayoi Kusama.”
It wasn’t until 1994, during an uptick in the Japanese economy, that Miyatsu had a chance to turn his love into a lifelong pursuit. That year, many office workers enjoyed two monetary bonuses instead of the usual one. While his friends opted for luxury watches or a Honda sports car, Miyatsu went looking to buy a Kusama.
There was a problem though – he had no idea how to buy artworks. He called seven or eight museums, and one pointed him to a gallery where he fronted up to the dealer with a budget equivalent to AU$3000.
“I went to the gallery and he showed me around 10 small works, including the very small painting of a pumpkin. But at the end of the showing I fell in love with one very simple but powerful drawing: black painted polka dots on white paper. It’s like a 1953, very early polka-dot drawing. But he told me, ‘I’m sorry, Miyatsu-san. This is two times of your budget.’”
Miyatsu struck a deal with the art dealer and paid half as a deposit, with the rest to come after he received his winter bonus. He then had to explain the purchase to his wife – and apologise. It was not until auction houses started sending him catalogues and she saw that the art appreciated in value that she became comfortable with his seemingly rash financial decision.
But Miyatsu has never sold a piece from his collection. “The real collectors don’t want to sell. Collection is not investing. Collection is collection. And market value is just a market value. You trust yourself, your eyes. That is my style.”
Among the more than 500 pieces he has amassed over three decades – many of them early- and mid-career works by contemporary artists, including video and multimedia art – several are artworks by Kusama, nine of which he has lent to the NGV for its major exhibition Yayoi Kusama, a comprehensive retrospective of the star nonagenarian artist.
Although the exhibition brings together many works from other galleries and art museums, it’s the extensive inclusion of pieces from a handful of private collectors that sets the experience apart from previous Kusama exhibitions.
“The installation idea and the way of NGV is very innovative, focusing on the context and the relationships between artworks,” says Miyatsu, whose first visit to Melbourne included a tour of the exhibition with his wife ahead of its December 2024 opening. “ My collection is my collection but [here it’s] side by side with some of my friends’. Kusama collectors meet at art fairs and Kusama shows all over the world, so it’s like a class reunion feeling.”
When the works aren’t gracing the walls of galleries and museums worldwide, they are either displayed in Miyatsu’s home – his “Dream House”, designed and decorated in collaboration with several of his artist friends, and featuring artworks everywhere from the staircase to the toilet – or kept in one of four temperature-controlled warehouses in Japan for optimum preservation.
“All of my collection is my collection, but not my own. This is just getting the baton of a relay race – I have to pass my collection like a baton to the next generation.”
Yayoi Kusama runs until April 21 at NGV International. Find more information and get your tickets at ngv.vic.gov.au.
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