Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She had little formal training, studying traditional Japanese painting only briefly (1948–49) at the Kyōto City Specialist School of Arts. She came to the United States in 1957 and lived in New York City for 16 years, establishing herself as an avant-garde artist and becoming a major figure in performance, happenings, and Pop Art and Minimalist art movements, along with her peers and friends, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Joseph Cornell, and Donald Judd. She was particularly well known at that time for her infinity paintings and “dots,” which infiltrate her canvases, sculptures, prints, and clothing, and have even spread beyond into performance and installation art.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. In 1975 she was voluntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she lived and made art. Much of the inspiration for her artwork came from her mental health challenges.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though. 

Yayoi Kusama

One of her early hallucinations manifested as a field of dots. Instead of becoming incapacitated by her illness, she turned to the arts as a creative treatment and solution. Her use of dots and their repetition became an obsession, numbering in the hundreds of thousands for some large-scale works of art. She once said, “Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity.”