Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, Japan, 1929 – Tokyo, Japan, 2026) spent seven decades developing polka dots, net patterns, and mirrored infinity into a single sustained idea she called self-obliteration: the dissolution of the boundary between a single body and its surroundings, achieved through repetition dense enough to erase the edges of both.

Kusama traced the idea to a childhood hallucination in provincial Japan, in which a field of red flowers on a tablecloth appeared to spread across the ceiling, the walls, and her own body until she felt she was dissolving into the pattern. In 1955, still an unknown painter, she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe for guidance; O'Keeffe wrote back and helped introduce her to New York gallerists, and in 1957 Kusama left Japan for the United States. There, working in marathon sessions, she developed her monochromatic Infinity Net paintings, dense fields of small looping brushstrokes that read, from a distance, as a single undifferentiated surface, a deliberate rebuff to the individual gesture prized by de Kooning and Pollock, and became a fixture of the downtown scene, sharing an apartment with Donald Judd.

Over the following decade, Kusama extended self-obliteration outward into participation: at anti-Vietnam War happenings staged in New York in the late 1960s, she painted polka dots directly onto the naked bodies of participants, a literal enactment of the idea that repetition could dissolve the boundaries, political and sexual as much as visual, between individual bodies. Her mirrored Infinity Rooms, begun the same decade and developed continuously for the rest of her life, extend the same logic into architecture: a small chamber of lights and mirrors in which a viewer's own reflection repeats into apparent infinity, distinct in kind from the soft, stuffed-fabric sculptures of the same period and from the later, more widely reproduced pumpkin motif.

Health crises brought Kusama back to Tokyo in 1973; in 1977 she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital, where she lived for the rest of her life, working daily in a nearby studio she had built for the purpose. A wave of institutional reassessment, beginning with her 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern and continuing through the Hirshhorn Museum's traveling Infinity Mirrors and a major survey at Tokyo's National Art Center, recovered a career in which male peers were once credited for ideas she had originated. She was still making new work daily in her tenth decade, and remains one of the few artists to have turned a single psychological experience into an entire, expanding visual language. "Our earth," she said, "is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos."