🇯🇵 Yayoi Kusama

As a child in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama began to see things that were not there. Flowers spoke to her. Dots multiplied across every surface. The tablecloth's pattern spread up the wall and across the ceiling until it covered her body and she dissolved into it. These hallucinations terrified her, but they also gave her what she recognized, even as a girl, as the material of art. "I would cover a canvas with nets," she later explained, "then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my own body. I forgot about myself as I painted the nets." Painting was her cure. Art was how she held on. She has been making it obsessively for more than seventy years, and the world has recently caught up.

Born on March 22, 1929, into a prosperous but troubled family in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, Kusama showed artistic talent from childhood and was drawing obsessively by her teens. She studied traditional Nihonga painting in Kyoto but quickly found its conventions insufficient for what she was trying to do. In 1958, she moved to New York City — a young Japanese woman with no English, almost no money, and a burning ambition. She wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe asking for advice; O'Keeffe actually replied, urging her to be bold. She was.

The New York years (1958–1975) were Kusama's most artistically explosive period. In a downtown art world dominated by Abstract Expressionists and then Pop Artists, she made work that fit neither category and anticipated both. Her "Infinity Net" paintings — enormous canvases covered in tiny, obsessively repeated arching brushstrokes, thousands and thousands of them — overwhelmed viewers with their scale and their hypnotic uniformity. Donald Judd praised them. Frank Stella studied them. Kusama made them in marathon sessions, sometimes painting for days without sleep, her body aching, her hand automatic. The nets were both symptom and therapy: a visual rendering of the obsessive mental state she was trying to exorcize through making.

She then pivoted to sculpture — "soft" phallus forms covered in polka dots that she arranged in obsessive accumulations on chairs, couches, and boats, creating "Accumulation" sculptures that mixed the erotic, the comic, and the uncanny in ways that anticipated feminist art theory by a decade. She organized "Happenings" in Central Park and on Wall Street, performances in which she painted polka dots on naked participants — transgressive acts that attracted both press attention and police. She protested the Vietnam War. She was simultaneously avant-garde performance artist, political provocateur, and psychological patient, and she made no clear distinction between these roles.

The centerpiece of her mature work — the invention that would eventually make her the most attended living artist in the world — was the Infinity Mirror Room. The first, created in 1965, was a small room lined on every surface with mirrors, a single light source multiplied into apparent infinity. Standing inside it, a viewer experiences the dissolution of selfhood that Kusama's hallucinations had always threatened: the body disappears into pattern, the individual dissolves into the infinite. It is a profoundly Buddhist experience built out of carnival-house technology, and it has lost none of its power through the hundreds of iterations she has created since.

In 1977, exhausted and in fragile mental health, Kusama voluntarily entered a psychiatric facility in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where she has lived ever since — walking daily to her studio across the street to paint. This arrangement, which might seem like defeat, has in fact been extraordinarily productive. From her studio and her institution, she has maintained a global output of paintings, sculptures, installations, and writings that has only accelerated with age. In 2017, Tate Modern in London and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington both mounted major retrospectives; the Hirshhorn's Infinity Mirrors exhibition drew over 103,000 visitors in six weeks, with queues stretching around the block.

Her market prices have soared accordingly. In 2022, "Infinity Nets (TWPOY)" sold at Christie's for $7.9 million. She has collaborated with Louis Vuitton, created giant pumpkin sculptures for Naoshima Island, and been ranked by ArtReview as one of the most powerful people in the art world — not bad for a woman who checked herself into a mental institution at 48 and never left. In 2017, she opened the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, where her work fills five dedicated floors with dots, nets, and mirrors.

Now in her mid-nineties, Kusama continues to paint every day. Her red wig is as iconic as her spots. She has described art as her way of surviving, of communicating across the gulf of mental illness, of connecting her individual consciousness to the universal pattern she sees everywhere she looks. "If it were not for art," she has said, "I would have killed myself long ago." The world is fortunate she did not, and fortunate that it took its time to understand what she was always offering.