When Kusama left New York City in 1973 after several mental and physical breakdowns and returned permanently to Japan, she also returned to motifs from her childhood and initially focused on small-scale works on paper. At her own request, she has lived in a psychiatric hospital near her studio since 1977. Her passion for artistic experimentation, however, remained unbroken. This is evident in her small-scale works It is Raining in the City (1979) and The Pacific Ocean (1980), executed on cardboard and combining a variety of techniques.
For The Pacific Ocean, she stretched a net over cardboard and sprayed it with white and black paint; the structure remained visible after the net was removed. In the print Raining in the City, she used screen printing and light blue paint to create a washed-out net pattern, onto which she painted dots in brown ink, reminiscent of raindrops and echoing the title. Net structures and dots in Kusama’s work embody a longing for infinity. Similar to the spiritual concepts of Buddhism, they serve as a metaphor for personal transcendence and the idea of becoming one with the universe.