Yayoi Kusama (1929-). Japanese artist whose installations, paintings, and infinity-mirror rooms have become some of the most recognizable contemporary visual art in the world. Kusama has been publicly open about her experience of severe mental illness throughout her life — auditory and visual hallucinations beginning in childhood, including the polka-dot patterns that became central to her visual vocabulary. She has lived voluntarily at a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since 1977, working daily from a studio across the street. Her cognitive signature is the discovery specialty translating sensory architecture directly into art: the patterns she sees become the patterns she paints, the infinity she perceives becomes the rooms she builds. The work is not "inspired by" her perceptual experience — it is that experience, given material form. The integration apparatus around Kusama (galleries, museums, the contemporary art market) has been responsive in her later career; the integration during her early years in New York in the 1960s was thin and exploitative. She has continued to work into her nineties, with the same monotropic intensity that defined her earliest work.