08/28/2026
I admired and followed Yayoi Kusama long before the dots became a global phenomenon, before the Louis Vuitton collaborations, before the lines around the block for her Infinity Rooms.
I was drawn to what existed beneath all of it.
Her repetition was never simply pattern. Her dots were not decoration. They emerged from a deeply personal way of seeing the world. Since childhood, she experienced vivid hallucinations in which patterns, flowers, dots, and fields of color seemed to multiply, expand, and engulf her surroundings and even her own body. Rather than retreat from those experiences, she transformed them, obsessively and relentlessly, into a visual language of her own. Repetition became a way to confront fear, dissolve the self, and give form to what she called “self-obliteration.
I had the blessed opportunity to travel to Matsumoto, Japan, the city where she was born. I walked its streets, visited the museum dedicated to her work, and felt an extraordinary essence there that allowed me to understand her on a much deeper level. That experience not only changed the way I saw her work; it helped me grow as an artist and deepened my own love and understanding of art.
What has stayed with me most about Kusama is not the fame she eventually achieved, but the extraordinary act of turning what could have consumed her into creation.
Fear into repetition.
Obsession into discipline.
Vulnerability into an infinite universe.
She spent a lifetime dissolving boundaries between object and space, the individual and infinity, suffering and beauty, and continued painting until her final days.
For someone who believes deeply that art changes the way we experience space and ourselves within it, her work has always meant much more to me than dots.
Thank you, Yayoi, for showing us how an inner world can become infinite.
Yayoi Kusama
Matsumoto, Japan
1929 – August 14, 2026
