BREAKING #337

Yayoi Kusama

Nicole Ex

Column

September 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

September 2026

Before the opening, I found myself in the museum shop. I asked the sales assistant – wearing a polka-dot waistcoat handmade by his friend – what had struck him most about the exhibition, which all staff had been allowed to see the day before. ‘Her childhood drawings,’ he said, visibly moved. ‘They came straight from her studio.’

Those drawings take us back to a girl for whom the visible world had already begun to lose its fixed contours. She was ten when she first put her hallucinations on paper in the form of dots. Even then, her drawings contained a sense of depth that made something of that boundless world tangible – fields that seem to continue beyond the edge of the paper. He was right. They are deeply moving.

It is a wonder those drawings still exist. Her mother destroyed much of her work: ‘She hated to see me painting, so she destroyed the canvases I was working on.’ Years later, Kusama herself would destroy a large part of her early work, shortly before leaving for America. We see her walking, that slight, courageous woman in her pink kimono, through the rough streets of New York.

Kusama turned her hallucinations into more than art: she made them into a cosmology. A worldview in which human beings, nature and the universe are connected. A model in which the individual self dissolves – ‘self-obliteration’ – and in which repetition, dots and nets are not symptoms, but an ordering principle of another universe.

‘My message I convey to you, my most beloved people, through my artwork, is the joy of being alive… 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.’* That same unbridled life force runs through the entire exhibition, full of love and an uplifting sense of joy.

After the press presentation, we meet one of Kusama’s studio assistants. I ask her about those small, familiar moments in their daily work together. Before the interpreter has even translated her words from Japanese, her face lights up. She smiles broadly: ‘She would always say: “I think I’m going to make my best work today.”’

— Nicole Ex
founding editor

PS See an impression of our visit to the exhibition here.

* From the poem: Yayoi Kusama, Polka Dot Café in the Universe, 2007.