Yayoi Kusama Museum: Inside the Discipline of Infinity and the Art of Relentless Becoming.

Yayoi Kusama has always understood that excess can be a form of clarity. Long before the polka dot hardened into global shorthand, it functioned as a stabilising device - a way to negotiate visions that arrived without consent. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, Kusama’s earliest relationship with drawing was not expressive but structural. Visual and auditory hallucinations collapsed the boundary between inner and outer worlds; repetition became a way to hold the line. The dot, the net, the field - these were not motifs but methods.

What distinguishes Kusama from artists whose work emerges from psychic extremity is her refusal to aestheticise the condition that produced it. Hallucination was neither mythologised nor concealed. It was organised. Through obsessive repetition and multiplication, she arrived at what would become her defining philosophy of self-obliteration. This was never about disappearance. It was about dispersal: the self diffused across space until it could no longer dominate.

Her departure for the United States in 1957 sharpened this logic. New York offered scale, friction, and resistance - an art world structurally disinclined to accommodate an Asian woman working outside its sanctioned categories. Kusama responded not by assimilating but by overproducing. Her Infinity Net paintings pre-empted Minimalism while rejecting its emotional neutrality. Her soft Aggregation sculptures, dense with proliferating forms, confronted sexuality as something to be worked through rather than displayed. These were not symbolic gestures but operational ones: art as an apparatus for survival.

The happenings of the 1960s, so often flattened into images of countercultural excess, read differently when seen as part of a consistent system. Nude bodies painted with dots did not perform scandal so much as erasure. Gender, hierarchy, authorship - all dissolved into pattern. At a moment when the cult of the artist was consolidating, Kusama proposed vanishing as a form of control. Mirrors and lights did not return the viewer to themselves; they absorbed them, folding perception back into the field.

Infinity, but make it disciplined. Not a spectacle - a system.

Her return to Japan in 1973 is frequently misread as retreat. In practice, it marked a compression. Performance and installation had reached saturation; painting re-emerged as a site where decades of thinking could be condensed and recalibrated. The canvas became less a surface than a membrane, carrying accumulated memory forward. What followed was not a softening but a clarification.

That clarity is most evident in My Eternal Soul, produced between 2009 and 2021: approximately 900 paintings completed in twelve years. The scale is staggering, but the tempo is more telling. These works do not resolve; they accrue. Each painting is autonomous yet inseparable from the whole, functioning less as individual statements than as entries in an ongoing ledger of consciousness. The subsequent series, EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, begun in 2021, extends this rhythm. Prayer here is not supplication but repetition - a daily discipline rather than a conclusion.

Institutional recognition eventually followed. Kusama received Japan’s Order of Culture in 2016, and her work has since been the subject of major retrospectives at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and M+. These exhibitions confirmed her position not as an eccentric outlier but as a central figure whose influence runs through contemporary painting, installation, performance, fashion, and popular culture. Yet Kusama has never ceded authorship to institutions. Her relationship with them remains precise, strategic, and unsentimental.

The Yayoi Kusama Museum, opened in Tokyo in 2017 and operated by the Yayoi Kusama Foundation, is perhaps the clearest expression of that stance. Conceived by the artist herself, it resists monumentality in favour of concentration. Two exhibitions per year, supported by lectures, publications, archival materials, and ephemera, present Kusama’s work as an active, evolving practice. Timed entry reinforces a simple proposition: attention is not optional.

This framework shapes the current exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Fighting Woman / Painting Girl (October 16, 2025 - March 8, 2026). Rather than smoothing contradiction into narrative, the exhibition insists on duality. The “fighting woman” emerges from Kusama’s New York years, where her identity as an Asian woman in a white, male-dominated art world sharpened both her politics and her resolve. These works are confrontational, bodily, and resistant.

The “painting girl” appears most vividly in her later practice. Innocence here is not regression but endurance - expressed through saturated colour, playful figuration, and an insistence on joy that coexists with memory of struggle. The exhibition brings together early drawings, Aggregation sculptures that functioned as acts of psychological overcoming, and archival documentation of nude performances and fashion projects, alongside recent paintings rendered with uncompromising intensity. Three-dimensional works of girls and flowers give physical form to her imaginative universe, while a world-premiere small-scale mirrored room reiterates her lifelong inquiry into infinity and erasure.

What becomes clear is that these identities are not sequential but simultaneous. The fighter and the girl coexist, tempering and sustaining one another. Kusama’s refusal to resolve into a single story may be her most radical gesture. She does not offer transcendence. She offers persistence.

In an era obsessed with reinvention, Kusama’s practice proposes something quieter and far more exacting: continuation. The dot repeats because the mind does. The net expands because experience does. Love and peace, in her work, are not sentimental endpoints but daily labour. To enter Kusama’s universe is not to be dazzled into silence, but to be reminded - gently, relentlessly - that art can still operate as a discipline of survival: obsessive, rigorous, and, against all odds, generous.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Yayoi Kusama.