Trade of Innocents

Yayoi Kusama is Japan's most successful living artist. The 85-year-old is famed for her polka-dot-covered artworks, but behind her colorful art lies a troubled and difficult past. Yayoi Kusama is Japan's most successful living artist. The 85-year-old is famed for her polka-dot-covered artworks, but behind her colorful art lies a troubled and difficult past. The inspiration for Kusama's use of repetitive patterns comes from the hallucinations she has suffered since early childhood and for nearly 40 years she has lived in a psychiatric hospital, fighting, through painting, the daily urge to commit suicide. This film follows Kusama during the preparations for Tate Modern's 2012 retrospective of her work, when Kusama undertook the mammoth physical and mental challenge of creating 100 new works for the largest-ever exhibition of her art.