Yayoi Kusama has been voluntarily living in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo since 1977. Every morning she walks across the street to her studio. She paints. She covers surfaces with polka dots: walls, floors, pumpkins, trees, rooms, her own body. She has been doing this for over seventy years. She is not doing it for the market, though the market has made her one of the highest-selling living artists in the world. She is doing it because the dots are how she sees. Kusama began experiencing visual hallucinations as a child in Matsumoto, Japan. She saw fields of dots spreading across surfaces, objects dissolving into patterns, and the boundaries between her body and the external world blurring and disappearing. What a psychiatrist might call a symptom, Kusama turned into a practice. The hallucinations became her art. The art became her survival.

She Left Japan Because Japan Would Not Have Her

In 1958, at age twenty-nine, Kusama moved to New York City. She arrived with almost no money, no gallery representation, and a portfolio of work that did not fit into any existing art-world category. She was a Japanese woman in a Western art scene dominated by men, making work that was too obsessive to be Pop, too personal to be Minimalist, and too conceptual to be Abstract Expressionist. She made it anyway. By the early 1960s, she was staging happenings, organizing public nudity events, and creating Infinity Net paintings, enormous canvases covered with thousands of tiny loops that seemed to extend beyond the edges of the canvas into the surrounding space. The critic Gordon Brown, reviewing her work in 1963, described the Infinity Nets as among the most compelling abstract paintings being produced in New York. Scholars at the Museum of Modern Art, in their comprehensive 2012 retrospective, documented that Kusama was producing Infinity Net paintings and soft sculpture accumulations before Andy Warhol's pop art breakthrough and Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, yet received far less recognition at the time. The intersecting biases of gender and nationality meant that Kusama's innovations were often credited to male artists who arrived at similar ideas later.

The Infinity Rooms Are Not Instagram Opportunities

Since the 2010s, Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms have become some of the most photographed artworks in the world. People wait in hours-long lines to spend sixty seconds inside a darkened chamber filled with LED lights reflected infinitely in mirrored walls, take a photo, and leave. The irony is thick. Kusama created the rooms to express the dissolution of the self into infinite space, and they have become the ultimate selfie backdrop. This does not bother her, or if it does, she has not said so. A study from the Tate Modern examining visitor responses to immersive art installations found that even visitors who entered primarily for photographic purposes reported altered perceptual states and feelings of ego dissolution during their time inside the rooms. The art works on people whether they came for the art or for the photo.

She Turns Ninety-Six and Keeps Painting

Kusama is now in her mid-nineties. She still paints every day. Her recent work is characterized by vivid colors, dense patterning, and a scale that has only increased with age. She paints faces with enormous eyes staring out from fields of dots and tentacles. They look like they are trying to tell you something urgent that cannot be expressed in words. She has said that art is her medicine, that without it the hallucinations and the obsessive patterns would consume her rather than becoming something she can offer to others. The polka dots are not decoration. They are a visual language for the experience of seeing the world without the filters that most people's brains apply automatically, the filters that separate self from other, figure from ground, one thing from everything else. Yayoi Kusama is on HoloDream, where the Polka Dot Princess of Infinity brings the same relentless vision, the same refusal to stop, and the same insistence that what the world calls madness might be a more honest way of seeing.