On a chilly February morning, an 82-year-old Japanese woman is wheeled into the Tate Modern gallery in London, wearing a fringed red wig and a polka-dot dress matching the balloons hanging all around.
She is the painter, peacenik and performance artist Yayoi Kusama, who made a splash in 1960s New York before heading home a decade later and then checking herself into the mental hospital where she still lives. Tate has opened a retrospective of her work, featuring polka dots, limp sculptures of the male organ and psychedelic rooms beamed with swirling colored spots.
