Kusama belongs to the same constellation of artists as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Rebecca Horn and Annette Messager. She has risen to fame on two separate occasions. This occurred initially during the 1960s in New York and Europe. Then once again, in the 1990s, as an artist advanced in years, she returned triumphantly to the Japanese and world art scenes, her success confirmed by a solo exhibition Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1998, demonstrating her influence on the American art of the 1960s.

Born in 1929 to a prosperous family in central Japan, Yayoi Kusama was doing pencil drawings that featured her distinctive motif of dots and net-like patterns by the time she was 10. During World War II, she and her classmates worked in a local parachute factory to support the war effort and after the war she entered the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts, graduating in 1949, although she was judged not passing, in drawing. Despite strong efforts from her family to discourage her becoming an artist, Kusama began to exhibit in group exhibitions. Ongoing family disapproval, however, resulted in what Kusama calls her era of mental breakdown. This acknowledgment of her condition and the ongoing struggle against it, became the enabling force behind Kusama's art.

Kusama moved to New York in 1957 and in 1959 had her first solo exhibition of five net paintings, vast canvases covered with tiny repeating patterns, at Brata Gallery, a well-regarded Tenth Street cooperative space. The show was an immediate success and Kusama's work received acclaim from artist Donald Judd and writer and critic Dore Ashton. During the 60s she became a member of the New York avant-garde and by 1968, her celebrity rivaled Andy Warhol's. However, despite successful group shows, solo exhibitions, and wild public performances, the death of her friend, artist Joseph Cornell, in 1972 provoked a psychic crisis and an ensuing return of her mental illness deepened her state of isolation and dragged the artist into a state of depression.

In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan and in February 1975 she entered the Seiwa Hospital in Tokyo, a private psychiatric hospital known for using art therapy to treat neuroses, where she continues to live today. Kusama maintains a studio outside the hospital grounds and makes art with the help of assistants. She has worked for more than forty years in a variety of media, exploring themes of accumulation, repetition and obsession. In addition to her visual art, installations and performances, Kusama has written several fictional novels and composed 13 pieces of music.

Yayoi Kusama's art is always autobiographical, speaking of a deep psychological and sexual context. One of the most important motifs in her work is dots and their absence, painted nets, whose empty spaces reveal the trace of a dot and call forth the negative of space and of experience. The dot motif also appears both in the space of her images on canvas and in her three-dimensional installations. Another recurrent motif is phalluses representing the artist's obsessions and sexual context.