Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama born March 22, 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan, is an artist, actress and writer. She is a Japanese contemporary artist working in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, film, and installation, to produce a body of work unified in its use of repetitive, densely patterned motifs. Considered a predecessor of Pop Art. Yayoi Kusama moved to New York in 1958, quickly establishing herself as an important member of the avant-garde alongside Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Eva Hesse. She has explained her use of repetition and polka dots as a means to explore infinity and obsessively negate the self, such as in her immersive installations Infinity Mirror Room (1965) and Fireflies on the Water (2002). Though she returned to Japan in the 1970s to live in a mental hospital and briefly fell into obscurity, her work received newly heightened recognition and popularity after she represented Japan in the 1993 Venice Biennale. She has been the subject of regular museum and gallery exhibitions ever since, and in 2008, broke records as the highest-priced living female artist. She lives and works in Tokyo.