In 1977, Yayoi Kusama, then forty-eight, checked herself voluntarily into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo. She had returned to Japan from New York four years earlier, exhausted, in debt, and suffering from the same hallucinations and obsessive thoughts that had been part of her life since she was about ten years old. The hospital admitted her as an outpatient with the option to remain in residence for as long as she found it helpful. She found it helpful. She has remained in residence since.

Her studio is across the street from the hospital. She walks to it most mornings. She has produced, since 1977, hundreds of paintings, large-scale installations, a series of Infinity Mirror Rooms that have travelled to most major museums in the world, several novels, an autobiography, and a flagship gallery installation at the Whitney Museum that broke the Whitney's attendance records when it travelled to New York in 2021. She is, by sales figures, the highest-earning living woman artist in the world.

Matsumoto

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a small city in central Japan. Her family ran a wholesale seedling and plant nursery, and her childhood was financially comfortable. It was not emotionally stable. Her mother was abusive toward her. Her father was repeatedly unfaithful and frequently absent. Kusama's mother used her, from about the age of five, as a kind of spy on the father's affairs.

The hallucinations began when she was about ten. She would later describe seeing the surfaces of objects around her dissolve into patterns of small dots, or into nets of intersecting lines. The dots would expand and consume the room. The nets would surround her body. She would lose track of where she ended and the room began. The experience was frightening but also visually intense.

She began drawing the patterns. The early drawings (preserved in her foundation's archive in Matsumoto) are obsessive accumulations of small marks: dots, circles, and intersecting curves filling entire sheets of paper, with the drawn figure half-emerging from the pattern. The drawings were her way of containing the hallucinations by giving them an external form.

Tokyo and Then New York

Kusama trained at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in the late 1940s, studied traditional Japanese nihonga painting, and exhibited her first works in Tokyo in the early 1950s. The Japanese art world of the period was deeply conservative, dominated by an elder establishment with no interest in the kind of obsessive abstract drawing she was making. She decided to leave.

She wrote, in 1955, to Georgia O'Keeffe, sending her several drawings and asking for advice. O'Keeffe, then in her late sixties and living in New Mexico, wrote back: she encouraged Kusama to come to America. In 1957, Kusama arrived in Seattle. By 1958 she was in New York, in a Lower Manhattan loft, painting the first of the Infinity Net series.

The Infinity Nets were large white-on-white canvases covered with thousands of small painted curved marks. Each canvas might have 50,000 individual brush-strokes. Kusama painted them in sessions of fifteen to eighteen hours, without breaks. Several of the canvases were eight or nine metres across. Critics in New York noticed. By 1961, Kusama was exhibiting alongside Donald Judd and Frank Stella. By 1963, she was producing Accumulation sculptures (everyday objects covered in stuffed-fabric protrusions) and the first of the mirror-and-light environments that would become her signature.

The Sixties

Kusama spent the 1960s in New York at the centre of an avant-garde scene that included Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, and Joseph Cornell. She had relationships with several of them: a long platonic friendship with Cornell, a romantic relationship with a sculptor whose name she has not publicly disclosed.

She organised what she called Happenings: nude performances in public places (Wall Street, Central Park, the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art) where performers covered their bodies and the surrounding objects with painted polka dots. The performances were political (anti-Vietnam, anti-capitalist, sexually liberationist) and produced large quantities of photo and film documentation.

The Happenings made her famous in New York and disreputable in Japan. The Japanese press covered the New York performances with shock and disgust. Her family in Matsumoto stopped speaking to her. She had become, in the eyes of conservative 1960s Japan, a national embarrassment.

The Collapse

By 1973 the pace of work and the New York scene had broken her. The hallucinations had returned in force. She was deep in debt. She had been hospitalised several times in the late 1960s after suicide attempts. She made the decision to return to Japan.

The return to Japan was difficult. She was nearly fifty, with no money, no Japanese reputation, and a family that did not want to acknowledge her. She lived in a small flat in Tokyo and tried to write. She produced several novels during this period: deeply obsessive, hallucinatory, and largely ignored by the Japanese literary establishment.

In 1977, she checked herself into Seiwa Hospital. The decision was practical: the hospital provided structure, medical supervision, and physical safety. It was also chosen with care. The hospital allowed her to leave during the day to work in a studio. It would not require her to give up her practice. She negotiated the terms of her residence carefully.

The Studio Across the Street

The studio across the street from the hospital became, over the next four decades, the engine of her late career. She would walk to it every morning at around 9 a.m., work until late afternoon, and return to the hospital for the evening. The schedule has continued, more or less unchanged, for nearly fifty years.

The work produced in this period is what built her international reputation. The Infinity Mirror Rooms (which she had begun in New York in 1965 but developed extensively from the 1980s onward) became her signature: small enclosed spaces lined with mirrors, with LED lights or small painted objects inside, creating the impression of an infinite extension of pattern. The room asks the viewer to step inside and stand in the centre. The pattern obliterates the boundaries of the room and the viewer's sense of where they are.

The Mirror Rooms map, in physical form, the experience Kusama has had for nearly her entire life. The hallucinations she has fought since she was ten have been turned, over six decades of work, into rooms that other people can step into and feel some version of what she has felt. The art works, in part, because the maker is showing the audience something she has direct access to.

The Recognition

The international rediscovery began in earnest in the early 1990s. A series of museum exhibitions (the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, the Venice Biennale in 1993, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998) made the case for Kusama as a foundational figure in postwar art. The 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern brought her to wide European notice. The 2017 Hirshhorn Museum show in Washington broke attendance records.

The 2021 New York Botanical Garden installation and the 2022 Tate Modern Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibition together became the most-visited contemporary art events of their years. Kusama, at ninety-three, was the highest-earning living woman artist by sales figure.

What the Hospital Allows

The decision to live in a psychiatric hospital is unusual for a public figure of Kusama's prominence. Her case is unusual: she has the resources to live anywhere in the world, but she has chosen the hospital because it provides what she needs for the work to continue.

The hospital offers continuity. It offers medical supervision when the hallucinations are severe. It offers a routine that does not change with international demand for her work. It removes from her daily life the pressures (social, financial, logistical) that contributed to her collapse in the 1970s. The studio across the street is the only place that needs her.

Kusama is in her mid-nineties. She continues to work. The exhibitions continue. The hospital and the studio are still where her days happen. The hallucinations are still there. The polka dots that began at ten are still being painted.