Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生, Kusama Yayoi, born 22 March, 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealist,Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.

Kusama has been open about her mental health. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. 

The origin of her mental and nervous disorders is called “depersonalization”: a detachment within the self, regarding one’s mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself. Subjects feel they have changed and that the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, lacking in significance or being outside reality while looking in. This is a way to cancel reality when it causes us too much suffering.