Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist, made the infinity rooms and the polka dot, and has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since 1977. She is in her nineties and still working.

Born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, her Sun sits at the first degree of Aries, the opening degree of the whole zodiac: an identity built around going first, most itself when it has something to push against, and inclined to invent an opponent when none is available. Her Moon is in Leo, which needs to be appreciated before it feels settled and is generous to a fault once it is. There is no air at all in her chart, not one of the ten planets, which is the part of a chart that steps back and keeps a comfortable distance from its own feelings.

That Sun stands square Saturn to within three quarters of a degree, and the pair form a T-square with Mars: two planets facing each other and a third pulling at right angles to both, so the pressure has nowhere to settle and has to be put into something. Sun square Saturn is identity meeting a rule that will not move, with the compensation that whatever gets built under it tends to outlast its maker. For a woman who grew up in wartime Japan, left for New York with almost nothing, and has gone on making the same work for seventy years without stopping, a chart with no retreat in it and nowhere to put the pressure but the work is not a difficult reading.

In February 2024, at ninety four, Jupiter returned to its birth degree. A Jupiter return opens a new twelve year chapter, which is a strange and rather wonderful thing to be handed at that age, and she is still at the easel for it.