The dots of infinity: When yayoi kusama dissolved the world in obsession

01The hallucinated childhood of an artist at war with the void

The family home in Matsumoto, where Kusama grew up in the 1930s, was a place of violent contradictions. Her father, an inveterate seducer, collected mistresses under the marital roof while her mother, an authoritarian woman, sent young Yayoi to spy on his infidelities. "I saw things no child should see," she would later confess. In this theater of domestic betrayals, hallucinations became her refuge. The dots first appeared as a curse—patterns that colonized tablecloths, walls, even people’s faces. Then, gradually, they transformed into a weapon.

At nineteen, she sent a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, whose paintings she had discovered in a Kyoto bookshop. The American painter replied, encouraging her to come to the United States. In 1957, Kusama arrived in Seattle with sixty kimonos and fifty dollars in her pocket. She spoke almost no English but already carried within her the project of an artwork that would swallow the world. Her first Infinity Nets, painted in a tiny New York studio, were monochrome canvases covered in thousands of tiny interlocking arcs. From a distance, they looked like vibrating surfaces; up close, you could see the trembling of her hand, the struggle against the anxiety that drove each loop to repeat, again and again.

02New York, 1965: when art became a physical experience

It was in a Lower East Side loft in 1965 that Kusama invented what we now call immersive art. Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field was a cubic space whose walls, floor, and ceiling were entirely covered in mirrors. At its center, hundreds of red fabric phalluses with white dots sprouted from the ground like an organic forest. When you stepped inside, the reflections multiplied endlessly, creating the illusion of a boundless universe where the viewer became both subject and object.

What struck visitors about this installation was its simultaneously sensual and clinical dimension. The phalluses, often interpreted as a satire of the surrounding machismo, were in fact extensions of the Accumulations she had been creating since 1962—everyday objects (chairs, staircases, suitcases) covered in soft protmajor digital platformsances. "I wanted to show that sex is everywhere, in objects as much as in our heads," she would explain. But more than that, she sought to materialize the sensation of being overwhelmed, engulfed by one’s own obsessions.

That same year, she organized Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead in the sculpture garden of the Stable Gallery. Naked performers, covered in dots, mimed sexual acts before a stunned audience. The police intervened, but the event marked a turning point: Kusama had just invented political happening. Her dots were no longer just a motif but a weapon of mass subversion.

03The Venice scandal, or art as an act of rebellion

In 1966, the Venice Biennale refused her official participation. No matter: Kusama installed Narcissus Garden without permission in the gardens of the Arsenale. Fifteen hundred stainless steel spheres, arranged on the grass like a sea of mirrors, reflected the visitors and the Venetian sky. She stood nearby, dressed in a gold kimono, selling the balls for two dollars each. "Your narcissism for sale," proclaimed a sign.

The organizers, furious, ordered her to dismantle the installation. She refused. For three days, Kusama played with the limits of the art institution, turning an elitist exhibition into a popular marketplace. The balls, now scattered in collections around the world, still bear the traces of that rebellion—some are scratched, others have stickers left by visitors.

This radical gesture raised a question that remains relevant today: who does art belong to? The institutions that legitimize it, or those who experience it? By selling her mirrors as consumer objects, Kusama anticipated debates about contemporary art and its relationship to the market. Irony of history: those same balls now sell for millions at auction.

04Therapy through obsession: when painting becomes an exorcism

In her Tokyo studio, where she has lived since 1977 in a psychiatric hospital, Kusama paints every day. At ninety-four, her hands sometimes tremble, but the ritual remains the same: she sits before a blank canvas and begins to trace dots. "I paint so I won’t kill myself," she says. Each dot is a battle won against the anxiety that has inhabited her since childhood.

Her assistants say she often works to the point of exhaustion, covering canvases several meters wide in just a few days. In the 1990s, she developed a faster technique: she used stencils to apply the dots, then retouched them by hand to give them an organic appearance. Some critics saw this change as a concession to mass production. In reality, it was a logical evolution: after spending decades painting each dot individually, she understood that the effect of infinity did not depend on the perfection of the gesture but on its obsessive repetition.

Her Pumpkins (giant pumpkins covered in dots) illustrate this new freedom. Unlike the Infinity Nets of the 1960s, where each loop had to be identical, the dots on the pumpkins vary in size and color. Some overflow, others fade. "The pumpkin is my self-portrait," she explains. "It’s round like me, and like me, it wears dots that protect it."

05Mirrors of the soul: when the viewer becomes the artwork

Step into The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), and you’ll understand why the lines for her exhibitions stretch for kilometers. The room is a six-meter black cube, lined with mirrors and pierced by hundreds of tiny LED lights that flicker like stars. When the door closes behind you, the walls disappear. You float in an infinite cosmos, your reflection multiplying endlessly in every direction.

What strikes visitors about these Infinity Mirror Rooms is their ability to create an experience that is both intimate and collective. Each visitor lives the same illusion of infinity, but each feels it differently. Some laugh, others cry. A woman proposed to her partner in Love Forever (1994). An autistic child spent an hour motionless in Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity (2009), fascinated by the shifting reflections.

Kusama has often explained that these pieces were a metaphor for her own perception of the world. "When I look in a mirror, I don’t see my face, but thousands of Yayois stretching into infinity," she says. In her installations, she invites the viewer to have the same experience: to dissolve into the universe in order to find oneself again.

06The paradoxical legacy: between consecration and co-optation

In 2012, Marc Jacobs, then creative director of Louis Vuitton, launched a collaboration with Kusama. The dots invaded the windows of stores around the world, from handbags to scarves to dresses. Some saw it as a betrayal; others, a democratization of her art. Kusama, for her part, seemed amused. "Dots are for everyone," she declared. "Even for those who can’t afford a million-dollar painting."

This ambiguity lies at the heart of her legacy. On one hand, she is celebrated as a pioneer of feminist and immersive art. On the other, her image is co-opted by marketing, her dots turned into decorative motifs. Yet when you look closely at her works, you realize that this co-optation is part of her project. Her dots are not mere decorations—they are viruses, designed to contaminate the world.

In 2021, streaming platforms released Infinity, a documentary about her life. For the first time, the general public discovered the breadth of her work, from the hallucinatory paintings of the 1950s to today’s monumental installations. The film also revealed a troubling truth: despite her fame, Kusama remains an outsider. She still lives in the psychiatric hospital, surrounded by her assistants and her canvases. "I’m not a famous artist," she says in the documentary. "I’m an artist who survived."

07Infinity and beyond: what the dots tell us about the world

When asked what her dots mean, Kusama invariably replies: "They are a way of disappearing." In a world obsessed with individuality and visibility, this idea is radical. Her installations are not spectacles but spaces of dissolution. When you enter an Infinity Mirror Room, you accept losing your contours, becoming a particle among others.

This philosophy finds a particular echo in the age of social media. Visitors to her exhibitions post photos of themselves in the mirrors, transformed into dot-covered avatars. Ironically, what was conceived as an experience of disappearance has become a performance of the self. Kusama, who spent her life fighting narcissism, finds herself at the heart of selfie culture despite herself.

Yet if you look beyond the clichés, her works continue to ask essential questions. What remains of us when we disappear? How do we live with our obsessions without letting them consume us? Can we find infinity in a tiny dot?

In her Tokyo studio, an unfinished canvas awaits. Red dots emerge from a white background, like drops of blood on snow. Kusama knows she may not have time to finish it. But it doesn’t matter. The work is already there, in that infinite repetition that defies death. Each dot is a promise: the world can be recreated, again and again, to infinity.