Yayoi Kusama (born March 22, 1929 in Matsumoto City, Japan) is a contemporary Japanese artist, best known for her Infinity Mirror Rooms, as well as her obsessive use of colorful dots. In addition to being an installation artist, she is a painter, poet, writer, and designer. Shie is considered to be one of the nost importand living Japanese artists and the most successul female artist of all time.
From a very young age, Kusama experienced hallucinations in which a single pattern would engulf everything in her field of vision. As Kusama explains, "one day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body, and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness." These themes of self-obliteration and representation of the infinite would become an obsession for Kusama as she attempted to represent what she believed to be her alternate reality. Her use of dots became the manifestation of this effort and has become the defining motif in her work.
