Polka Dots Seen in Passing – Yayoi Kusama in Taipei

At the beginning of 2025, during our journey around the world, Taipei offered us one of those quiet, unexpected moments that stay with you. We were riding the metro toward the city’s outskirts, heading into nearby forested areas, when something unusual appeared outside the window. Behind the glass façade of a building, enormous reddish forms emerged, covered in black dots. For a brief moment, it felt as if a living polka-dot organism had slipped into the cityscape.

We wondered what we had just seen. Almost instantly, Karin said: “That looks like Yayoi Kusama.” And with that, Naoshima came rushing back to us—the Japanese art island in the Seto Inland Sea, where Kusama’s work had left a deep impression years earlier. The simplicity of her visual language—dots, repetition, bold colors—combined with its unwavering consistency, had stayed in our memory. And of course, there were the pumpkins: playful, iconic, and strangely monumental. (Benesse Art Site Naoshima)

But could these red forms in Taipei really be by Kusama?

A quick search confirmed it: an exhibition of Yayoi Kusama was currently on view at the Museum of the National Taipei University of Education. The timing was perfect. Just before our onward flight to Tokyo, we rearranged our plans and made room for a visit—and we were glad we did.

Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, has developed one of the most distinctive artistic languages of the last decades. From an early age, she experienced intense visual perceptions—patterns, dots, and fields that seemed to spread endlessly across surfaces. Art became her way of translating these inner experiences into something visible, tangible, and shareable. Over time, polka dots and infinite nets became her signature: repetition not as decoration, but as a way of dissolving boundaries between object, space, and self.

Her life path was anything but conventional. After moving to the United States in the late 1950s, she became part of the New York avant-garde, working across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation. Later, she returned to Japan, where she continues to work daily with remarkable discipline and focus. Creativity, for Kusama, has always been closely tied to survival—a way of confronting fear, anxiety, and excess by giving them form.

The Taipei exhibition captured this balance perfectly: lightness and seriousness, playfulness and rigor. What we had seen from the train was not a decorative curiosity, but a continuation of a lifelong artistic logic—bold, immersive, and unmistakably Kusama.

Naturally, we bought the exhibition catalogue. In true Kusama fashion, it was more than a book. Its cover was made of the same material as the large inflatable red sculptures themselves, turning the catalogue into a tactile echo of the installation. You don’t just take images home—you take a sensation.

Since our visit to Naoshima, we had associated Kusama primarily with pumpkins, firmly anchored in the landscape and collective memory of the island. Taipei offered something different: not a return, but an expansion. Not a pumpkin by the sea, but polka dots glimpsed in passing, embedded in the rhythm of the city.

A chance encounter, seen through a train window—and a reminder that art sometimes finds you before you go looking for it.