We think we know Yayoi Kusama. Polka dots, yellow pumpkins, mirror rooms where people now come to photograph their own reflection multiplied to infinity. But these cheerful images do little to convey the woman who created them. Behind the colour lies a darker quest: to break down the boundaries between her body and the world, to tame through repetition what haunts her, and to give form to infinity. Her works are perhaps less images to be looked at than mirrors in which she attempts, paradoxically, to disappear. Five anecdotes allow us to follow this dizzying journey.

Writing to Georgia O’Keeffe, or refusing to stay in her place

In the 1950s, Kusama was still a young, unknown artist when she discovered Georgia O’Keeffe in a book. She found her address, sent her a few watercolours and asked for advice on becoming an artist in the United States. O’Keeffe replied. A few years later, Kusama left Japan for New York.

There is already much of her in this boldness: Kusama refuses to accept the place assigned to her. In a New York dominated by the major male figures of Abstract Expressionism, she invents her own language. Thousands of tiny white loops fill her canvases: the Infinity Nets. With No. F (1959), the painting has almost no centre, no beginning and no end. It seems to continue beyond its edges. Kusama had found her guiding principle: to repeat something until it loses its boundaries.

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Yayoi Kusama burns 2,000 works, or making the person she once was disappear

Before leaving for America, Kusama recounts having burnt nearly 2,000 works behind her family home. As if she had to destroy the artist she had once been in order to become the one she wanted to be.

This idea of disappearance would become central. Kusama calls it self-obliteration: the act of erasing oneself. A single dot exists; ten thousand dots engulf whatever they cover. In Accumulation No. 1 (1962), repetition thus extends beyond the canvas: an armchair disappears beneath a proliferation of soft, phallic outgrowths. Then it was furniture, bodies, rooms. For Kusama, to create is also to make things disappear.

Painting until she no longer knew where the canvas ended

Kusama recounts that she sometimes painted her Infinity Nets for three or four days almost without sleeping. Through the sheer repetition of the same gesture, she reportedly saw the patterns leave the canvas, invade the windows, the room, and then her own body.

Her work then takes on another dimension: it is no longer enough to depict her inner world; she wants to draw us into it. In 1965, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field transformed this sensation into a physical space: the mirrors endlessly reflect the polka-dot shapes that fill the room.

This marks the origin of her famous mirror rooms. But behind their spectacular beauty lies a more dizzying question: what remains of us when our image is reproduced ad infinitum? Faced with an ordinary mirror, we search for our face. With Kusama, we end up losing it.

Exploring the body to master what eludes it

Whilst studying traditional painting in Kyoto, Kusama recounts that she would meditate in the mud under driving rain before returning home to pour ice-cold water over her head. An almost ascetic anecdote that reveals just how closely creation and the body are linked in her work.

In 1960s New York, she covered naked bodies in polka dots during happenings: after the canvases and objects, the individual themselves disappears beneath the pattern. In Narcissus Garden (1966), hundreds of reflective spheres reflect back to the visitor their own face, tiny and multiplied amongst all the others.

Narcissus gazed at his reflection to find his uniqueness; Kusama multiplies it until it vanishes. The more she reproduces our image, the less unique we are.

‘I will challenge Picasso with a single dot’

Kusama recounts that a renowned French painter once advised her to look more closely at the work of other artists. She decided to do exactly the opposite: she is ready, she writes, to challenge Picasso, Matisse or anyone else with a single polka dot.

Her entire career seems to be encapsulated in this conviction. The polka dot is almost insignificant; yet, repeated ad infinitum, it can engulf a body, a room or a world. Her famous pumpkins, which took on monumental proportions from the 1990s onwards, continue this exploration in a more tender form. Then, with installations such as The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), a few lights and a few mirrors are enough to make the visitor float in the midst of a seemingly infinite cosmos.

The journey she has taken then becomes crystal clear: Kusama first painted the infinite, then brought it out of the canvas to invade objects and bodies, before giving it a space of its own through mirrors. Finally, she has placed us within it.

Behind the artist known for her polka dots and pumpkins lies a woman who has devoted her life to a strange contradiction: seeking to disappear into infinity and, in doing so, becoming impossible to forget.