Japan’s Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is one of the world’s most prominent contemporary artists. Her signature style is recognizable across a wide range of media from drawing and painting to sculpture, installation, performance, happenings and literature.
She resonates aesthetic elements from many cultures in her unique blend of Surrealism and Pop Art. Her never-ending complex patterns and countless variations of polka dots and grids in bright, bold colours are often interpreted as expressions of the artist’s mental health troubles and the idea of healing and care through art.
Plants and flowers have been a central visual element in Kusama’s art since the 1950s. The artist grew up on a seed farm and took part in field work from early childhood. She has described how she once took her sketchbook into the fields and sat among the violets, lost in thought, until she realized that the flowers appeared to be staring at her with their strangely human miniature faces, each one bearing a unique expression. Eventually, much to her amazement, the flowers began to speak.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Yayoi Kusama: Flowers that Bloom Tomorrow, 2011. Helsinki Biennial 8.6.–21.9.2025, HAM Helsinki Art Museum. Photo: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Sonja Hyytiäinen
Flowers that Bloom Tomorrow, 2011
Artwork location: HAM Helsinki Art Museum
Kusama brings uncanny flower power to HAM’s main lobby with a human-sized sculpture from her Flowers that Bloom Tomorrow series. Abstracted in form and riotously garish in colour scheme, the sculpture’s artificially glossy surface is decorated throughout, like Kusama’s early flower-themed paintings, in which the entire picture plane is bursting with polka dot patterns in radiant hues.
The sculpture looks whimsical and inviting, yet also menacing, like an alien species that should be approached with caution. Resembling a science fiction monster, Kusama’s flower is like a many-eyed carnivorous triffid that uses its roots to propel itself.