Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist best known for polka dots, “Infinity Nets,” and mirrored “Infinity Rooms.” She has openly connected her art to lifelong psychological distress—especially vivid hallucinations and intrusive, repeating visual patterns that began in childhood—and says she turns those experiences into images as a way to cope and “externalize” what she sees and feels.
Kusama Orange Pumpkin
Since 1977, Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution in Tokyo, while continuing to work daily in a nearby studio—an arrangement often described as helping her manage symptoms and maintain stability while sustaining an intensely productive practice. Her signature repetition (dots, nets, accumulations) is frequently discussed as both an aesthetic and a self-soothing structure: making order, rhythm, and “infinity” out of overwhelming sensations.
BigDel (tag: BIGDEL) is a Bangkok-based graffiti writer / illustrator and one of the early pioneers of Thailand’s graffiti scene—active for decades (often described as 25–30+ years in the culture).
A man on a motorbike passes by an old building screaming with graffiti. Mo Chit, Bangkok.
The myth of travel for me was that it would give me a new life. The truth is that it has given me a clearer view of the one I am already living.
I am writing this from Bangkok.
Twenty three years into a nomadic life that once felt like permanent ‘becoming.’
For a long time, I believed that if I moved far enough, something inside me would rearrange. That airports, bus terminals, and train stations were thresholds. That boarding passes carried permission. That somewhere else, I would feel more aligned with the person I was trying to become.
Chatuchak Market. Early morning. Before the consumers arrive.
Movement felt like possibility.
I keep thinking about how returning to Japan this time unsettled me. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. Just enough.
I kept waiting for recognition. For the version of myself who once loved Japan with a kind of hunger to step forward again. She did not.
The trains still ran precisely. The light still fell cleanly across the streets. The aesthetic restraint that once steadied me was still intact.
But I was not the same woman who needed that steadiness.
When I first lived there, in 2003, I required structure. I needed disciplined beauty. Japan felt like instruction.
Now I am less in need of instruction.
Feeling disillusioned in Tokyo, Japan. Fall, 2025.
Travel did not fail me. It clarified me.
Mobility, after twenty three years, is not reinvention. It is confrontation.
Confrontation with nostalgia. With former selves. With the illusion that geography can absolve you of continuity.
We romanticize starting over because it sounds hopeful. Because it sells tickets. Because it suggests we can outpace our own history.
But no skyline erases you.
Now, back in Bangkok, considering Vietnam not as destiny but as movement, I see this more clearly.
I am not searching for a new life.
I am tracing the shape of the one I have built.
I can’t calculate how long I sometimes stand, waiting for a bird that is buzzing around, to enter my frame. Birds in flight. Something I can relate to.
There is gratitude in that.
Gratitude that disappointment can be information rather than loss. Gratitude that cities act as mirrors. Gratitude that movement sharpens perception rather than promises transformation.
The myth of travel for me was that it would give me a new life. The truth is that it has given me a clearer view of the one I am already living.
And clarity, at this stage, feels steadier than reinvention.
