(1929) Japanese artist

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. She produced her first works (drawings, watercolors) in the 1950s, around recurring motifs from hallucinations of childhood, such as peas, which become her trademark. In 1957 she left Japan to live in New York in the US, where she participated indirectly in the Psychedelic movement and Pop Art. In 1960, she launched her manifesto of obliteration and said: "My life is a pea lost among thousands of other peas ..." . She then presented photos, collages, installations, with Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and also carried happenings. Mentally exhausted, she returned permanently to Japan in 1973, since her return she lives in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She has received numerous awards in Japan and abroad: She was decorated by the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2003 and then in 2006 she received the Praemium Imperiale in painting category, issued by the Japan Association of Fine Arts. She gained fame for installations with mirrors, red balloons, toys, among which she is featured. Her recent works are naive paintings on cardboard. In 2009, she signed the design of three mobile phones for the operator Au by KDDI, special series of more than one million yen (7,500 euros), with dots of course.