Abstract

This article examines the projects of Yayoi Kusama to reevaluate the dispositions, methods, and habits that have informed a remarkable creative practice. It accepts the significance of her self-proclaimed (and publicised) health conditions and life experiences, as they inform neuroaesthetic and autoethnographic perspectives for appreciating her expressive, surreal, and nonfigurative ventures. These paradigms explain both her intensive industry and some pictorial tropes sustained in her work. Beyond these, however, this article finds a deeper, culturally conditioned phenomenon sustaining the expansive cycles of invention in her work in habits of “asobi,” or play. It explains how playful dispositions inform her inventive rearrangements of Japanese conventional and sensory tropes, her interventions into the formal and gestural modes of New York-style modernism, and the engagement of interactive audience participation in her art. It suggests that an ethos of play empowers dispositions to inventive, creative practice in the arts and beyond.