Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. I, myself, delight in my obsessions. – Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This engaging memoir reveals her to be a fascinating, maverick figure, channelling her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. This revised edition for 2021 features a new foreword by Frances Morris, and a selection of Kusama's own poetry.

The decade Kusama spent in New York saw her status change from poverty-stricken artist living in a freezing loft and existing on scraps of food, to doyenne of the counter-cultural art scene. She tells the story of her relationships with key art world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom she forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan and to relative obscurity in the early 1970s, Kusama admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. It is from this base that she has emerged to add to the seemingly endless stream of artworks and writings that in the past decade have won her international acclaim and seen her the subject of many major exhibitions across the world.

This remarkable autobiography, translated by Ralph McCarthy, provides a powerful insight into the mind of a unique artist, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde.

Infinity Net traces, with suitably dreamlike intensity, the web of influences that shaped her and her art.
The Observer

No matter how I may suffer for my art, I will have no regrets. This is the way I have lived my life, and it is the way I shall go on living.
Yayoi Kusama

As well as being a prolific artist, Yayoi Kusama is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street, Manhattan Suicide Addict and Violet Obsession.

Ralph McCarthy has translated many Japanese authors including Osamu Dazai, Ryu Murakami and Kancho Oda.

• Artist Yayoi Kusama
• Exhibition Yayoi Kusama
• Dimensions 23.4 x 15.6 cm
• Material FSC certified paper and card
• Author Yayoi Kusama
• ISBN 9781849762137
• Paperback Yes
• Number of illustrations 30 black and white illustrations
• Publisher Tate Publishing
• No of pages 256 pp