Sometimes referred to as the 'princess of polka dots', Yayoi Kusama is widely recognised as one of the best-selling female artist of the 21st century. Her hypnotic, dotty dreamworlds have led to a worldwide museum craze—between 2014 and 2019, more than five million people queued for the artist's exhibitions around the world.

Born into a wealthy but allegedly unhappy family in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama felt discouraged from creating art by her mother and father. As a child, art-making became an act of rebellion for Kusama. Her training as an artist began at Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied Nihonga—a form of traditional Japanese painting. However, the artist disagreed with the rigid hierarchy of the genre. In hopes of finding success in the United States, she wrote to painter Georgia O'Keeffe (whose address Kusama had found at the American Embassy in Tokyo) for advice on entering the New York art world. To her surprise, O'Keeffe replied, warning her of the difficulties of working in the city.

In 1958, Kusama found the courage to relocate to New York, where she found herself in the thick of the avantgarde movements of the time. Surrounded by Minimalism and Pop art and incorporating elements of both into her work, Kusama's critical acclaim is pinned to the 'Infinity Net' series (1958-ongoing) that she began at this time: canvases engulfed by hundreds or thousands of small, colourful loops of paint. In 2014, White No 28, which belongs to the series, reached USD7.1 million at Christie's.

Kusama has often referred to repetition of form as offering Kusama solace from the traumas she has battled with since her youth. As a young girl, the artist recalls that her mother would ask her to spy on her father and Kusama has referred to the frequently incorporated phallic forms in her work, as seen in her 'Accumulation' series, begun in 1962, as an act of reconciliation with her childhood fears regarding what she might see. 'Accumulation' comprises soft sculptures made of found furniture covered in sewn, white penis forms. Later, the artist would fill entire rooms with these soft forms—such as Compulsion Furniture (Accumulation) (c 1964): a room filled with phallus-covered furniture. The installations that Kusama created in the 1960s were precursors to her best-known infinity rooms of today. In 1965, mirrors first appeared in the artist's work Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (1965), in which the floor of a square, mirrored room was covered in a layer of white, stuffed phalluses dotted in red.

A decline in the artist's mental health in the early 1970s saw her return to Japan. In 1977, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she has lived ever since—her studio is located across the road. Her own museum (Yayoi Kusama Museum), dedicated to her life-long practice, was founded in Shinjuku Ward in 2017. In recent years, the artist's repetitive dot motifs have spawned a set of mirror-room exhibitions internationally, including Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession, whose worldwide tour reached the biggest global audience for an art exhibition in 2015. In 2017, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, debuted another touring exhibition titled Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. Two-hour queueing times did not dampen the enthusiasm of thousands of visitors, who were granted a brief half-minute slot of solitude within the infinity rooms.

2018 marked the UK release of Yayoi Kusama: Infinity, a documentary directed by Heather Lenz that traces the artist's career, showing the artist not solely as a product of social media and market success, but an example of perseverance against the odds.