Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, to a prosperous family that ran a plant nursery. From about the age of ten she experienced hallucinations in which flowers talked to her and patterns of dots spread across everything she looked at. Drawing was the way she coped. Her mother, who wanted her to marry, tore up her pictures and sent her to spy on her father's affairs.

In 1955 she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe, whose work she had seen in a book, asking how to become an artist in America. O'Keeffe replied kindly, and in 1957 Kusama left for the United States with money sewn into her kimono and a bundle of drawings. In New York she painted enormous canvases covered in small looping marks, the Infinity Nets, sometimes for days without eating, and covered furniture in soft sculpted forms. Male artists borrowed her ideas and got the credit. She staged naked happenings against the Vietnam War, was disowned by her family and ended up broke and unwell.

She returned to Japan in 1973, largely forgotten. In 1977 she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and has lived there by choice ever since, working each day in a studio across the street.

Her mirrored Infinity Rooms, which began in the 1960s, now draw record crowds around the world, and she has said she intends to keep working until she dies.