Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama’s monumental and immersive installations are famous worldwide! Her works have inspired artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, and Damien Hirst. They have also been exhibited by the most prominent contemporary art institutions including the MoMA in New York, the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the Venice Biennale.

Born in 1929 in Nagano, Japan, Yayoi Kusama began drawing when she was a child. She started having hallucinations very early. After once having looked at a flowered tablecloth, she looked up to the ceiling and realized that she kept seeing the patterns. Kusama’s hallucinations remained ever-present in her work, particularly the famous polka dots. She studied at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts where she trained in traditional Japanese painting (nihonga).

At the time, it was rare to see a woman evolve as an artist in patriarchal Japanese society. Her parents were against her working as an artist, especially her mother, but this only strengthened her desire to make art. She also detached herself from traditional Japanese education and granted herself more freedom by taking Western models as inspiration. At the age of 27, she moved to Seattle and later to New York, where she was forced to live with little money.