Avant-garde artist and novelist. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture. From a young age, Yayoi Kusama experienced visual and auditory hallucinations, and began creating net and polka-dot pattern pictures. In 1957, she went to the United States and began making net paintings and soft sculptures, as well as organizing happenings and developing installations that made use of mirrors and lights, establishing herself as an avant-garde artist. Overcoming various obsessions, she discovered an artistic philosophy of self-obliteration via the obsessive repetition and multiplication of single motifs. She continues to actively devote herself to creating artworks, including her largest painting series My Eternal Soul from 2009-2021, amounting to over 800 works in 12 years, as well as a new painting series starting in 2021 titled EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE. She received Japan’s Order of Culture in 2016. Recently, Kusama has held large-scale retrospective exhibitions at various museums throughout the world, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and M+.