Mika Matsuoka has become a standout figure in the contemporary bead art world for her intricate and reverential reinterpretations of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets, a seminal series that helped define the language of postwar Japanese avant-garde art. Where Kusama used paint and repetition to explore the vastness of the mind and the dissolution of the self into pattern, Matsuoka translates these meditative fields into beadwork, adding a tactile and time-bound layer to Kusama’s already obsessive visual language. Her beaded Infinity Nets are not simply derivative tributes but transpositions—conceptually faithful yet materially transformative, breathing new life into Kusama’s motifs through the shimmer, tension, and structure of bead embroidery.
Born in Osaka and trained in both fine art and traditional Japanese textile embellishment, Matsuoka first encountered Kusama’s work in a Tokyo museum at the age of sixteen. Struck by the hypnotic repetition and psychological density of Kusama’s canvases, she began experimenting with ways to capture that same hypnotic pull using beads instead of brushstrokes. What began as small-scale studies eventually evolved into wall-hung panels and sculptural objects that mimic the visual rhythm of Kusama’s nets while introducing entirely new dimensions of texture and light.
At the heart of Matsuoka’s practice is an unrelenting attention to detail and an almost ascetic approach to repetition. Each panel consists of hundreds of thousands of glass seed beads, sewn one by one onto fabric backings using ultra-fine thread. Unlike paint, which can flow or be applied in broad gestures, beads require laborious precision. Each loop, cell, and curve that Kusama painted freehand must be interpreted bead by bead, with Matsuoka carefully planning transitions in density, color, and scale. The result is a textural field where every unit is a physical presence, and every repetition is embodied rather than implied. Her beadwork draws the viewer in, not just visually but physically—inviting close inspection and generating a shimmering effect that changes with light and movement.
Matsuoka’s choice of materials is both technical and symbolic. She works predominantly with Japanese glass seed beads, particularly those from Miyuki and Toho, prized for their uniformity and variety of finishes. For the nets themselves, she often uses matte white, ivory, or transparent AB-coated beads to echo the ethereal fragility of Kusama’s early monochrome canvases. Backgrounds are created using a carefully calculated gradation of darker tones—navy, charcoal, obsidian black—crafted from glossy and semi-metallic beads to provide dimensional contrast. In some works, she inverts this relationship entirely, letting the nets appear as negative space formed by densely packed backgrounds, emphasizing void rather than structure.
Though most known for her two-dimensional pieces, Matsuoka has also created beaded sculptures inspired by Kusama’s immersive environments. In one installation, titled “Net Continuum (After Kusama),” she covered a series of soft bulbous forms—reminiscent of Kusama’s biomorphic protrusions—with beaded nets that stretched and deformed across the curves. The interplay of geometry and distortion not only honored Kusama’s sculptural vocabulary but also demonstrated Matsuoka’s mastery of how beads can respond to and define form. The nets in this context took on new meaning: not simply fields of infinity, but membranes, skins, or protective veils clinging to ambiguous entities.
Matsuoka’s interpretations also engage deeply with the psychological dimensions of Kusama’s work. For Kusama, the Infinity Nets were a response to hallucinations and a strategy for both expressing and containing the boundless, sometimes terrifying, scope of her inner world. Matsuoka, though not directly channeling Kusama’s mental health struggles, sees in the act of beading a similar meditative and therapeutic potential. The repetitive motion of sewing beads becomes a ritual of focus and stillness, a way of navigating time and thought. This embodiment of mindfulness aligns her beadwork with the spiritual and existential undertones in Kusama’s paintings, where each mark asserts presence while also dissolving the ego.
Color, though sparingly used in Matsuoka’s Kusama interpretations, plays a deliberate and symbolic role. While many of her pieces remain faithful to the stark monochromes of Kusama’s original Infinity Nets, she has also created works in red and yellow, referencing both Kusama’s later palette and Japanese cultural symbology. Red, a color of both life and death in Japanese tradition, appears in glowing clusters within the nets—hints of rupture or emotion within the otherwise orderly expanse. Gold, associated with divinity and imperial beauty, occasionally shimmers beneath the surface, as though hidden truths lie just beneath the net’s control.
Her largest and most ambitious project to date, “Eternal Net in Threaded Time,” is a five-meter-long triptych entirely rendered in beads over the course of two years. Comprising over 1.2 million individual beads, it mimics the scale of Kusama’s large canvases while asserting its own medium-specific identity. The piece ripples with light across its surface, creating a dynamic visual experience that cannot be captured in photographs. Viewers who have seen it in person describe it as both serene and overwhelming, a paradox of order and obsession, precision and surrender.
Despite the clear homage, Matsuoka does not aim to replace or compete with Kusama’s vision. Instead, her work functions as a dialogue—between mediums, generations, and artistic temperaments. Where Kusama’s Infinity Nets dissolve into abstraction and metaphysical anxiety, Matsuoka’s reimagining reasserts their physicality. The beads, weighty and real, become anchors in a sea of repetition. Her work explores what happens when a painted illusion of infinity becomes a tactile, touchable field of persistence, labor, and resilience.
Mika Matsuoka’s beaded Infinity Nets reinterpret not only the form but the philosophy behind Kusama’s iconic series. They remind us that repetition is not always sterile; it can be devotional. That pattern is not necessarily confinement; it can be liberation. And that translation between mediums—when done with reverence and vision—can open entirely new dimensions within familiar terrain. Her work is a quiet, glimmering testament to the enduring power of obsessive art and the infinite ways it can be rethreaded through the needle of another hand.