You have almost certainly seen one of her infinity rooms in your social feed: a friend or a celebrity standing in a pitch-black space ringed by glowing dots that recede forever. The artist behind those viral images, the most commercially successful living artist on the planet, has voluntarily lived in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital since 1977. This episode is a deep dive into Yayoi Kusama and the radical idea she calls self-obliteration.

We trace the path from a wealthy but violent Matsumoto childhood (a mother who shredded her drawings, hallucinations of polka dots and pumpkins overtaking her vision) to her unlikely 1957 escape to New York with sewn-in cash, pen-pal advice from Georgia O'Keeffe, and a determination to outwork the male-dominated avant-garde. We unpack the Infinity Net paintings, the soft phallic Accumulation sculptures ...