Meanings and Origins
Curator Mika Yoshitake has stated that Kusama's works on display are meant to immerse the whole person into Kusama's accumulations, obsessions, and repetitions. These infinite, repetitive works were originally meant to eliminate Kusama's intrusive thoughts, but she now shares it with the world. Claire Voon has described one of Kusama's mirror exhibits as being able to, "...transport you to quiet cosmos, to a lonely labyrinth of pulsing light, or to what could be the enveloping innards of a leviathan with the measles".
Creating these feelings amongst audiences was intentional. These experience seem to be unique to her work because Kusama wanted others to sympathise with her in her troubled life. Bedatri D. Choudhury has described how Kusama's lack of feeling in control throughout her life made her, either consciously or subconsciously, want to control how others perceive time and space when entering her exhibits. This statement seems to imply that without her trauma, Kusama would not have created these works as well or perhaps not at all. Art had become a coping mechanism for Kusama.
This does not romanticize her struggles, but rather is an attempt to understand Kusama's position. Some psychological, scholarly authors have examined Kusama's art as her therapy. These authors defined art therapy as a method of therapy in which art is the method of therapy. These authors used Kusama as the contemporary epitome of mentally-ill individuals who used art as their intimate expression. These authors stated that her work was/is a direct product of her hallucinations. The act of creating what she saw was Kusama's method of trying to grasp and control what she saw in a life in which she did not much control. Kusama has also stated that art saved her from suicide.
Other research that had been analyzed by these authors had found that art therapy had and has a statistically-significant positive effect on patients with various mental disorders. No known sources have claimed that Kusama read about art therapy and experimented with it to see if it would help; sources seem to all be in agreement that her art flowed organically from her experiences with mental illness.