Japan's most successful living artist is 85 year old Yayoi Kusama. Famous for her polka-dot-based art, Kusuma has a hidden, troubled, and difficult past. Her work is inspired by the hallucinations she's suffered since early childhood, which to be fair, sound horrific; “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.”
She's spent the best part of 40 years living in a psychiatric hospital, using her art to fight herself through what she says is a daily urge to commit suicide. In the process, she's done some amazing things, like creating bags for Louis Vuitton in 2012 and covering their 5th Avenue store in New York with her signature dots, and curating window displays for Selfridges.
The BBC have produced a film that follows Kusama during the preparations for Tate Modern's 2012 retrospective of her work, for which Kusama took on the huge physical and mental challenge of creating 100 new works of art for the largest ever exhibition of her art.
The documentary is available on BBC iPlayer now for a limited time, so watch it before it disappears, it's worth it and take a look at some more of her art work below.
