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Yayoi Kusama (草間弥生 ,born March 29 ,1929)
has been called Japan's greatest living artist. 

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano|Matsumoto, Nagano
Prefecture, Kusama has experienced hallucinations
and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood,
often of a suicidal nature. 

Early in Kusama's career, she began covering
surfaces (walls, floors, canvases, and later,
household objects and naked assistants) with the
polka dots that would become a trademark of her
work. The vast fields of polka dots, or "infinity
nets", as she called them, were taken directly
from her hallucinations. 

She left her native country at the age of 27 for
New York City, on the advice of Georgia O'Keefe.
During her time in the United States, she quickly
established her reputation as a leader in the
avant-garde movement.  She organized outlandish
happenings in conspicuous spots like Central Park
and the Brookyln Bridge, was enormously
productive, and counted Joseph Cornell among her
friends and supporters, but did not profit
financially from her work.  She returned to Japan
in ill health in 1973.  

Her work shares some attributes of feminism,
minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art|pop, and
abstract expressionism, but she describes herself
as an obsessive artist. Her artwork is infused
with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual
content, and includes paintings, soft sculptures,
performance art and installations.

Yayoi Kusama has exhibited work with Claes
Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. Kusama
represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993,
and in 1998 & 1999 a major retrospective
exhibition of her work toured the U.S. and Japan. 

Today she lives, by choice, in a mental hospital
in Tokyo, where she has continued to produce work
since the mid-1970s. Her studio is a short
distance from the hospital.  "If it were not for
art, I would have killed myself a long time ago," 
Kusama is often quoted as saying. 

Yayoi Kusama said about her 1954 painting titled
Flower (D.S.P.S),
:"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. As I
realized it was actually happening and not just in
my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to
run away lest I should be deprived of my life by
the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up
the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart
and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle."

==External links==
*http://www.fantasyarts.net/Yayoi_Kusama_artwork.h
tm Yayoi Kusama Painting|Biography, and Historical
Information
*http://www.yayoi-kusama.jp/ Official Site