Eyes approaching

Yayoi Kusama’s mental instability and financial challenges resulted in the artist’s decision to return to Japan permanently in 1973. In a letter to her friend Udo Kultermann, she wrote: “I have come to the conclusion that it is better to work and earn money here [in Japan] and to spend it in New York (…) Above all, for the first time in several years I can sleep peacefully and without fear (...) I see no future in New York.” 
During this period, she began a series of collages in which she used clippings from magazines and other found objects. Nonetheless, panic attacks and hallucinations soon overtook her also in her homeland, leading her, in 1977, to voluntarily admit herself to a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, where she has lived ever since.
The three small-format works on paper - Eyes Approaching (1975), Bottom of the Sea (1980), and Insect (1980) - which were created after the artist’s return to Japan, are formally linked with a series of watercolors using pastel chalk from the 1950s, when Kusama was still living in Matsumoto. In the works, polka dots inflated into cells float before a dark background. 
In the collage Eyes Approaching, fishes and other sea creatures are entangled in an infinity net, which absorbs the pattern of their bodies and incorporates them, in a manner of speaking.