Before the infinity nets, there was ‘The Pacific Ocean’ – what origin stories focusing on Yayoi Kusama’s mental illness miss about her art

Before Yayoi Kusama became a global brand of polka dots and mirrored rooms, she was a young artist who flew from Japan to the United States in 1957 hoping to break into the American art scene, according to an art historian's commentary.

The historian points to Kusama's 1958 painting “The Pacific Ocean,” made after that trip, as evidence that her famous obsession with infinity was shaped as much by the anxiety and uncertainty of crossing an ocean toward an unknown future as by the mental illness that dominates most retrospectives.

The piece notes Kusama burned much of her earlier work before leaving Japan and spent that first year without securing a visa or steady income, a disappointing debut later folded into the tidier legend of overnight success in New York.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.