5 Things Yayoi Kusama Taught Me About Faith

I’ll never forget stepping into Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room for the first time. Surrounded by flickering candlelight that dissolved into endless reflections, I felt both weightless and grounded—a paradox that defines so much of Kusama’s work. Over the years, her life and art have quietly reshaped how I think about faith, not as doctrine, but as a practice of survival, creativity, and stubborn hope. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Faith is a Daily Act of Repetition

Kusama’s compulsive dot patterns aren’t just an aesthetic—they’re a lifeline. She began painting repeating motifs as a teenager to cope with hallucinations that made her feel “dissolved” by sensory overload. By transforming that chaos into order, she reclaimed agency. Today, at 85, she still paints daily at the psychiatric hospital where she lives, calling work “the reason I exist.”

There’s something monastic about this rhythm. Faith isn’t a grand gesture; it’s showing up to the easel, the prayer mat, the meditation cushion—even when the world feels fragmented. Kusama taught me that repetition isn’t boring; it’s the muscle memory of belief.

2. Finding God in Madness

In the 1960s, Kusama staged nude protests and floated balloons shaped like genitals in Central Park, all while battling schizophrenia and a hostile art world. Critics dismissed her as “crazy,” but she leaned into the label, once writing: “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day—and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.”

Her faith wasn’t in divine intervention but in the act of creation itself. In her defiance, I see a radical truth: sometimes faith means trusting your vision even when it’s mistaken for delusion.

3. Creating Light When You’re Full of Darkness

Kusama’s mirror rooms didn’t originate from New York galleries or Tokyo museums. They were born in her mind during her darkest moments. She’s described them as attempts to visualize “the endlessness of the universe,” a way to externalize the endlessness of her anxiety. When I step into one of these rooms, I’m struck by how she turns personal despair into shared wonder.

Faith, for Kusama, isn’t about erasing darkness—it’s about redirecting its energy. She once said her work is “a message to the whole world,” even as she privately grapples with suicidal thoughts. What might it look like to let our deepest wounds become the source of our light?

4. Detachment as a Form of Devotion

In 2017, Kusama donated 2,000 artworks to Tokyo’s city government, essentially giving her life’s work to the public. She lives modestly at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, painting six hours a day. There’s no hoarding of legacy, no clinging to fame.

This mirrors her early practice: in the 1960s, she gave away soft sculpture “mushrooms” on the streets of Manhattan. Her faith seems to rest in impermanence—letting go so others might touch what matters. It’s a lesson in devotion without possession, creation without entitlement.

5. Believing in What Others Can’t See

When Kusama moved to New York in 1957, she wrote letters to Georgia O’Keeffe, then became a protégée of Joseph Cornell. Both were outliers in a male-dominated art world, and both taught her to trust her intuition. Yet for decades, she was pigeonholed as a “Japanese weirdo” or “obsessive-compulsive artist.”

Only in her 70s did institutions embrace her whole work. I think of her 1966 Narcissus Garden—hundreds of reflective spheres sold one by one in Venice—as metaphor. Faith means believing in your vision long after others have walked away, even if you have to sell it piece by piece.

If you’ve ever felt like your struggles make you “too much” or your vision “too strange,” Kusama’s life whispers a quiet challenge: keep going. On HoloDream, you can ask her about the candles in her mirror rooms, the meaning of infinity, or how she keeps painting when the world feels endless and unkind. She might just remind you that faith is the first step in making your own light.