Yayoi Kusama, Hitomi (Eye), 1989

02 July 2026

Painted in 1989, Hitomi (Eye) belongs to a pivotal moment in the career of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, when she was re-emerging onto the international stage after a period of relative withdrawal following her return from the United States to Japan in the 1970s. The title, Hitomi, translates from Japanese as “Eye”, immediately foregrounding one of the work’s central motifs: vision, perception and the act of looking.

The painting presents a solitary eye suspended within a vibrant field of red with an intricate white net-like pattern overlayed on top. Rendered in acrylic paint, the composition combines two of Kusama’s most recognisable visual languages: the repetitive dots that have become synonymous with her practice and the delicate web structures of her celebrated Infinity Nets. First developed shortly after her arrival in New York in 1958, the Infinity Nets series consisted of painstakingly painted loops extending across the canvas, creating a sense of endless expansion. In Hitomi, these nets merge with a striking figurative image, demonstrating how Kusama’s work of the 1980s fused abstraction and representation in increasingly imaginative ways. The eye itself appears both watchful and vulnerable, while the surrounding patterns suggest a limitless psychological and cosmic space.

Kusama’s fascination with repetition originates in childhood experiences of hallucinations, during which dots and patterns seemed to engulf her surroundings. She later described seeing motifs spread across rooms, objects and even her own body, an experience that became the foundation of her lifelong concept of “self-obliteration”: the dissolution of the individual into the infinite universe. The eye in Hitomi may therefore be understood as a self-portrait of perception itself, reflecting the artist’s enduring interest in the relationship between inner vision and external reality.

The year 1989 was particularly significant for Kusama. That year, the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York organised the first major retrospective of her work in the United States, helping to reintroduce her to the American art world she had left more than a decade earlier. The painting thus belongs to a moment of renewed recognition and creative confidence. Its bold imagery also reflects the influence of the New York avant-garde, where Kusama had worked alongside contemporaries associated with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

Hitomi (Eye) can be seen as a synthesis of the themes that define Kusama’s oeuvre: infinity, repetition, psychological introspection and the transformative power of art. Through a deceptively simple motif, the artist invites viewers into a world where seeing becomes both a personal and cosmic experience.