Art by Yayoi Kusama

Kusama has said the polka dots started as hallucinations in childhood: fields of flowers or the pattern on a tablecloth spreading uncontrollably until they covered everything in sight, including her own body. Rather than treat that as something to suppress, she built an entire six-decade career out of it, turning "self-obliteration" through repeated pattern into her defining idea. The Infinity Mirror Rooms, small mirrored chambers filled with lights or polka-dotted forms that appear to extend forever in every direction, have become some of the most photographed artworks alive, to the point that museums now cap visitor time inside them to a minute or two per group.

She moved to New York in 1958 and spent the next decade and a half in the thick of the downtown avant-garde alongside artists like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. She's long argued, with real justification, that some of her innovations in soft sculpture and mirrored installation were picked up by better-connected male peers who got the credit she didn't at the time.

In 1973 she returned to Japan, and in 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she has lived ever since by choice, walking each morning to a studio across the street to keep working. She's in her late nineties now and still producing new pieces; a career retrospective opened at Fondation Beyeler in late 2025, running into 2026.