When we look at a work of art, what do we actually see? The artist’s way of interpreting the external world, their imagination or perhaps a part of their inner world that would otherwise remain invisible to others? The life and work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama take this question in an unusual direction. The dots, nets, flowers, pumpkins, mirrors and endlessly proliferating images that characterize Kusama’s art are not merely aesthetic choices; they are artistic translations of the hallucinations and perceptual experiences she has lived with since childhood. In other words, rather than fleeing from the involuntary and initially frightening images that emerged in her mind, Kusama painted them, repeated them, multiplied them and ultimately transformed them into a world that others could experience as well.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama grew up in a deeply troubled family environment. Alongside tensions within her family, she was exposed at an early age to the harsh conditions created by World War II and was forced to work in a factory while still a child. Yet one of the experiences that most profoundly shaped her life and art was the hallucinations she began to have during childhood. She saw flowers speaking to her, objects around her covered in lights and dots and patterns multiplying until they engulfed her entire surroundings. One of the best-known examples is her experience of seeing the floral pattern on a tablecloth spread across and fill an entire room. What is particularly striking, however, is how Kusama responded to these images. Rather than trying to suppress the frightening visions, she would run home and begin drawing what she had seen. Drawing reduced the fear generated by these experiences. Thus, from her childhood onward, art became a way for Kusama to cope with what was happening in her mind. Images produced by her mind and beyond her control were externalized through art and transformed into tangible objects that she could work with.

For this reason, interpreting Kusama’s dots merely as colorful and playful forms would mean overlooking an important part of their story. The same applies to her famous nets. In her "Infinity Nets" works, which she began producing in New York in the late 1950s, the canvas is almost entirely covered with thousands of tiny loops and net-like forms. The repetition becomes so dense that the individual forms lose their significance, and the eye encounters what appears to be a boundless surface. Kusama sometimes produced these repetitive patterns for days, working with almost no sleep. Repetition is one of the fundamental mechanisms of her artistic practice. When we understand Kusama’s art not as a means of completely overcoming her psychological difficulties but as a way of living with and managing them, repetition can be seen as acquiring a meditative function for the artist, as explained in the research titled "Yayoi Kusama’s Art and Its Clinical Relevance to Neurovisual Phenomena.” Art thus became one of the means through which Kusama was able to cope with the difficulties she experienced. Indeed, another study, "Yayoi Kusama’s Depictions of Mental Health,” examining Kusama’s art from the perspective of mental health specifically, emphasizes that her aim was less to "recover” than to adapt and find a way to continue living.

Kusama’s life after the 1970s is even more striking in this respect. Following the intense period of artistic activity she experienced in New York, she returned to Japan and, in 1977, voluntarily began living in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Yet she continued to work, going each day to her studio near the hospital. The hospital therefore provided her with a structured and protected environment, while her nearby studio allowed her to continue creating. Kusama’s life thus came to be organized between two distinct spaces: on the one hand, the hospital as a place of order and protection that enabled her to keep her mental disturbances under control; on the other, the studio, where those same disturbances could be released and transformed into art. The disorder that had to be managed in everyday life became, in the studio, a source of creative production.

Perhaps the most significant turning point in Kusama’s art came when she moved her personal experiences beyond the boundaries of the canvas and into physical space. The "Infinity Mirror Rooms" are the most striking example of this transformation. Through mirrors, lights and repeated forms, images multiply; the boundaries of space become blurred and a powerful sense of infinity emerges. The viewer is no longer simply observing the work but is invited to enter it. This creates an extraordinarily compelling experience: the perceptual world that once existed only in Kusama’s mind and caused her fear is transformed into an architectural space and opened up for others to experience. A new study, "Yayoi Kusama’s Art and Its Clinical Relevance to Neurovisual Phenomena," published in 2026 approaches this aspect of her work from an even more intriguing perspective. The authors interpret the infinite repetitions, lights, dots and changes of scale in Kusama’s works as visual analogues of neurovisual phenomena such as palinopsia, visual snow syndrome, macropsia and micropsia, emphasizing that her art offers an unusual visual vocabulary that may help us understand such neurovisual experiences. Certain perceptual experiences that people find difficult to describe can thus become more comprehensible or easier to articulate through Kusama’s art.

The second major transformation in Kusama’s art is the gradual evolution of a visual language born from her personal hallucinations into a global visual language. Her dots initially belonged to her own inner world; over time, however, they spread from canvases to sculptures, rooms, clothing, shop windows and exhibitions around the world. Kusama opened her own boutique in 1969 and incorporated dots into her performances and clothing; much later, through her collaboration with Louis Vuitton, the same visual language entered the global circulation of the fashion industry, as explained in the research of "Installation Artist in the Fashion Industry: Yayoi Kusama.” Thus, a world of dots that she had once experienced with fear as a child became, decades later, one of the most instantly recognizable visual languages in the world. In this process, it was not only her works that became iconic. Kusama herself – with her red wig, polka-dot clothing and appearance increasingly integrated with her artistic creations – also became an artistic image. The use of life-size figures of Kusama, dressed in polka dots and wearing her signature red wig, in Louis Vuitton shop windows in 2012 offers a symbolic example of this transformation.

Perhaps this is precisely the most striking aspect of Kusama’s artistic journey spanning nearly 80 years: For her, art became not a means of escaping reality but a way of living with her own reality. The little girl who tried to diminish her fear by drawing the images she saw would, decades later, invite the entire world to step inside those images. Kusama did not free herself from her hallucinations; she transformed them. She moved the perceptual experiences she could not control first into line and color, then into repetition, mirrors and space and finally into public culture. In doing so, a world that initially only she could see was transformed into a shared visual world that will endure far beyond her own lifetime.