Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan. She began painting as a child to express hallucinations and escape a family dynamic marked by abuse and neglect. At the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, she studied Nihonga, a style of formal, traditional Japanese painting. She moved in 1958 to New York, inspired by the rise of Abstract Expressionism and a letter from Georgia O’Keeffe.