Avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama works in many different mediums, including sculpture, painting, performance, books, poems and installation. Her impact can be seen in a wide range of creative movements, including minimalism, pop art, feminist and environment art, and she is viewed as one of Japan’s most influential living artists. Although she trained at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in the traditional Japanese painting style of Nihonga in 1948, she quickly turned her back on these established artistic conventions and developed her own unique abstract, conceptual style. The major motif in her work is polka dots. Suffering hallucinations since she was a child, the polka dots are a representation of this experience and, for Kusama, the sign of infinity.
