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Yayoi Kusama

  • lsimonsart
  • Oct 13
  • 3 min read

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most iconic and influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929, she began making art at a young age, often drawing and painting patterns that reflected her vivid internal world. She has spoken openly about experiencing hallucinations since her childhood, where she would see fields of dots stretching endlessly around her. These visions became a core part of her artistic language, evolving into the endless patterns and mirrored spaces that are showcased in her work today.


In the late 1950's, Kusama moved to New York City, USA. It was here where she became part of the avant-garde scene alongside artists such as Andy Warhol. Here her work oten explored themes of repetition, accumilation, and the obliteration of the self. She curated environments that seemed to dissolve the reality of the viewer, allowing them to cross over a boundary and into the artwork—like stepping into the mind of another.


Kusama returned to Japan in the 1970's and voluntarily entered into a psychiactric hospital, where she continues to live and work. From here she has created some of her most known works, including her infinity mirror rooms, pumpkin sculptures, and polka-dot installations.


Image 1: Hirshhorn. 2009. “Infinity Mirror Rooms – Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors | Hirshhorn Museum | Smithsonian.” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian. 2009. https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/.

Image 2: Schulze, Martin. 2019. “Why Is Yayoi Kusama Obsessed with Pumpkins?” Public Delivery. July 26, 2019. https://publicdelivery.org/yayoi-kusama-pumpkins/.

Image 3: Zwirner, David. 2015. “Yayoi Kusama Brings Dotted Obliteration Room to New York.” Designboom | Architecture & Design Magazine. May 26, 2015. https://www.designboom.com/art/yayoi-kusama-david-zwirner-obliteration-room-new-york-05-26-2015/.


Yayoi Kusama's lifelong experiences of hallucinations, anxiety, and obsessive thoughts are not hidden behind her art—they are her art. The polka-dots, mirrors, and infinite reflections that fill her installations all come from the same perceptual space that she has inhabited since chilhood. She has spoken openly about seeing entire fields of dots or flowers multiplying endlessly around her; these experiences have become the visual core of her practice.


Here repetitive mark-making and mirrored environments echo the looping thought patterns and visual overstimulations that accompany obsessive-compulsive or hallucinatory states. She doesn't depict these experiences as something purly pathological. Instead, she re-frames them as creative systems—ways of making sense of sensory excess, of turning psychological overwhelm into rhythm and structure.


Kasuma has spoken an written about voluntarily living in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since the 1970's, continuing to make art daily from a nearby studio. That decision itself reflects how she integrates her mental health into her practice rather than separating the two. The infinity mirror rooms, for example, can feel like entering the architecture of her mind. Immersive, disorienting, and strangely meditative. In them, there is evidence of her neurodivergence not as narrative content but as spatial experience: endless reflection, self-obliteration, and a glitch between isolation and connection. It's as if she has mapped her perception outward, creating spaces where others can momentarily inhabit the same overstimulating infinity she's lived with since childhood.


Tate. “Yayoi Kusama – Obsessed with Polka Dots | Tate.” YouTube, February 6, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRZR3nsiIeA.


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