Yayoi Kusama portrait

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Yayoi Kusama: the artist of infinity and resilience

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Yayoi Kusama grew up among her family’s greenhouses and plantations. From childhood, hallucinatory visions imposed themselves upon her: shapes and patterns repeated, multiplying endlessly. What could have been a burden became the matrix of a singular artistic universe. She transformed these visions into a visual language, and her fragility into a source of creation.

In 1957, she left Japan to settle in New York. Her canvases with obsessive patterns, her soft sculptures, and her happenings marked by the presence of the body and desire found their place in the effervescent avant-garde of the time. Kusama did not seek conformity but sincerity: to give form to the unspeakable, to express the intensity of her inner world.

Her obsession with infinity is embodied vertiginously in her famous Infinity Rooms. Through the play of mirrors and lights, space dilates, extending without limits, drawing the viewer into an immersive experience where one is as much lost as found. Here, infinity is not a mere visual effect, but the echo of the artist’s inner struggle, transmuted into aesthetic freedom.

Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama chose to reside in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo, where she still lives today. Far from seeing this as an ending, she made it the foundation of a stability that allowed her to create relentlessly. Her prolific, uninterrupted body of work unfolds in paintings, monumental sculptures, immersive installations, performances, and writings. Like an ever-expanding forest, it continues to grow, never yielding to silence.

Today, her name resonates in the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Her dots and mirrors have become universal emblems, recognized far beyond the art world. But at the heart of this glory lies a profoundly human story: that of a woman who turned fragility into strength, and repetition into a path toward eternity.

In Yayoi Kusama’s universe, dots become galaxies, mirrors open like doors to infinity, and pain rises into constellations. Her work reminds us that resilience is not mere endurance: it is a way of inhabiting vertigo, of giving form to inner chaos, of transforming fragility into shared light.
To contemplate Kusama is to approach a rare truth: beauty is sometimes born from excess, and infinity, far from crushing the self, becomes the very space where it breathes.

References
– The Art Story – Yayoi Kusama
– National Gallery of Victoria – Matsumoto Plants and the Origins of Avant-Garde Artist Yayoi Kusama
– Japan Society Boston – Yayoi Kusama
– The Guardian – Yayoi Kusama Melbourne NGV Exhibit
– Artspace – Interview with Yayoi Kusama on Sixties New York and Living with Mental Illness

Photo by Susanne Nilsson

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