"I had this hallucination where I woke up one morning and found the windows blazing red, and my hands and feet and the floor was all covered up with bright red nets, and when I got near and touched them, the red nets stuck on my hands …That’s how I came up with the net painting."
Yayoi Kusama exhibited her first Infinity Net paintings in New York in 1959. Employing the minimal repeated gesture of a single touch of the brush, Kusama’s revolutionary paintings responded critically to the emotionally and semiotically charged brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Albeit a relative novice to oil painting at the t.mes , Kusama was able to at once firmly grasp and radically redefine the medium in bold defiance of gestural abstraction, meting out the ecstatic masculine gesture into dainty increments and forging a sophisticated feminine aesthetics of obsession and repetition. Replacing the expressive gesture with an exhaustive one, Kusama’s meticulous and labor-intensive methods literally pushed painting to its limits.
Diagnosed with an obsessional neurosis, Kusama used her art to "self-obliterate" hallucinatory visions through the process of compulsive reproduction of dots and lines. Her art was that of epic excess, exuding an infinitely self-perpetuating momentum that engulfs and overwhelms even as it entrances and enthralls. In a conversation with Gordon Brown in 1964 the artist declared: "My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was always standing at the centre of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me". Compulsively painting, often for days at a t.mes , Kusama’s high-intensity process is integral to the meaning of her celebrated Nets series: each loop and each line is indexical to her very being.
某個早上，當我醒來時有個幻覺，發現窗戶一片火紅，我的手和腳和地板都覆蓋了鮮豔的紅色網，當我走近觸摸它們，紅色網卡在我的手上......這就是我創作無限網畫作的靈感。
草間彌生一九五九年於紐約首次展出《無限網》畫作。她僅以顏料與單一筆觸，呈現微妙重複的動作，創出的革新畫作強烈呼應傑克森·波拉克及威廉·德庫寧充滿情感與符號的筆觸。縱然草間彌生當時只是初試油畫，她已充分掌握壓克力顏料，更以大膽挑戰的姿態抽象風格重新定義油畫媒材，為剛勁的動勢注入纖巧美感，以迷戀與重複塑造細膩的女性美學。她以無止境的筆觸取代活潑豐富的表現手法，透過細緻入微的密集繪畫，將油畫創作推向極限。
草間彌生被診斷為強迫症患者，她不由自主地反覆描繪圓點及線條，以藝術「自我隱沒」幻覺幻象。她的作品展現史詩式的壯麗盛景，流露出無限自我延續的力量，既像深陷旋渦，同時迷醉出神。她在一九六四年與戈登·布朗的對談中表示：「我的網不斷生長，走出我的身體，溢出我的畫布，蔓延至牆壁、天花板，最後覆蓋整個宇宙。在我內心對不斷增生和重複，我就是處於這種迷戀的中心。」草間彌生的強迫性創作往往持續數天，當中極度密集的過程結集其著名《網》系列的重要意義：每一圓圈與線條均代表她的生命。