From a Dot to Infinity: Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk Museum
There is something deceptively simple about encountering one of Yayoi Kusama's childhood drawings at the beginning of the Stedelijk Museum's major retrospective. Made when she was ten years old, the small work on paper depicts a young woman with her eyes closed, surrounded by dots that already seem to multiply beyond her. Kusama would later describe experiencing visions in which flowers, nets and dots proliferated through space and across her own body. Drawing became one way of giving form to these experiences and, perhaps, of controlling them.
More than seventy years separate these dots from the immersive environments for which Kusama became internationally famous. Walking through the exhibition, the distance between them begins to collapse. The strength of this retrospective lies precisely in its sense of continuity. Dots, pumpkins and mirrored spaces form the instantly recognizable language of an art world icon, but here we can see how that language emerged, evolved and expanded over the course of a lifetime. This gradual unfolding gives the exhibition its particular dramaturgy, tracing the development of Kusama's visual world from its earliest manifestations to the immersive environments that would eventually come to surround and absorb the viewer.
From a mark on paper to a room
A dot begins as a mark on paper. It multiplies. It becomes a field. The field escapes the canvas, occupies objects and bodies, spreads across rooms, architecture and eventually the landscape outside the museum. For the Amsterdam exhibition, dots have migrated onto the facade of the Stedelijk museum and onto the trees of Museumplein.
The exhibition, now open at the Stedelijk, spans more than 300 works and over seven decades of Kusama's practice, from childhood drawings and early paintings to sculpture, collage, fashion, performance, monumental installations and some of the final works she produced in Tokyo. Developed in close collaboration with Kusama and the Yayoi Kusama Studio, it became, following her death in August 2026, something the curators could not originally have anticipated: a tribute to an extraordinary artistic life.
The self, dissolved
In one of Kusama's earliest self-portraits, the features of the human face merge with a flower-like form. The boundaries of the individual become unstable. Rather than asserting the self through portraiture, Kusama appears to be imagining its dissolution: a desire to relinquish individual identity and merge with what surrounds it. As she would later put it: "By obliterating one's individual self, one returns to the infinite universe." Seen from this perspective, the early self-portrait contains something like a blueprint for the artworks to follow. What Kusama initially performs upon her own image is what she eventually asks the viewer to experience through her total environments.
The Infinity Mirror Rooms are perhaps the most literal realization of this proposition. Reflections multiply the body until the singular self becomes one image among seemingly endless others. The artwork loses its boundaries. We enter it. There is, however, a particular type of irony here. Kusama's spaces propose self-obliteration, while many of us enter them instinctively reaching for our phones. In an environment constructed around the dissolution of the individual, perhaps the most common gesture is to produce another image of oneself. Kusama's work makes us aware of the contradiction in ourselves. Has documenting our presence become one of the principal ways through which we confirm that we have experienced something at all?
Pumpkins, dots, and the joy of being alive
Kusama's most recognizable motifs have become so embedded in popular culture that it can be difficult to see them outside their status as icons. Yet returning to Kusama's own words reveals how personal their meanings remained to her. Her pumpkins, for instance, were companions before they were recurring forms. She described them as connected to childhood, peace and the joy of being alive:
"Pumpkins are lovable and their wonderfully wild and humorous atmosphere never ceases to capture the hearts of people. I adore pumpkins. As my spiritual home since childhood, and with their infinite spirituality, they contribute to the peace of humankind across the world and to the celebration of humanity. And by doing so, they make me feel at peace. Pumpkins bring about poetic peace in my mind. Pumpkins talk to me. Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins. Giving off an aura of my sacred mental state, they embody a base for the joy of living, a living shared by all of humankind on the earth. It is for the pumpkins that I keep on going."
The same is true of the dots. They are now so culturally ubiquitous that it is easy to forget how particular their meaning was to Kusama. A dot was always simultaneously microscopic and cosmic: a cell, a planet, a body, a star. It was always something singular that only becomes meaningful through its relationship to innumerable others.
Kusama imagined covering an entire café in pink dots until the space itself became transformed. What begins almost playfully, with the desire to turn everything pink, gradually expands into a vision of the universe and, ultimately, into a statement about what she believed art could offer:
"To cover everything in a café with pink polka dots; that is my desire. Polka dots in the pink-colored space fill everybody's heart with joy of everlasting love. In the universe, the moon and the sun are each just one of the polka dots. The earth on which we live and several hundred millions of stars all become pink by magic spells. Self-obliteration by polka dots. I call this 'Kusama's self-obliteration.' My message I convey to you, my most beloved people, through my artwork, is the joy of being alive. Peace for humankind. People on this quiet earth where there are no wars. For these people, I will continue to offer my art. I will keep calling out to every person, Love Is Forever, with a message colored pink. I will keep communicating with you, in the everlasting quietude of time."
Yayoi Kusama: From a Dot to Infinity runs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, through 17 January 2027. More information at www.stedelijk.nl.
