In the same month that Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is opening her very own five-storey Yayoi Kusama Museum, a beautiful new children's book illustrating her life and work is being published by illustrator Ellen Weinstein and MoMA curator Sarah Suzuki. 

The polka-dot mad Japanese polymath – who is famed for her mediums of painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and environmental art as well as literature and fashion – now features in children's book Yayoi Kusama: From Here to Infinity!

It was created alongside Kusama's studio in Japan, and opens up her colourful world to children with a combination of text written by Suzuki and gouache illustrations by Weinstein assembled digitially – documenting different stages in her life and career.

The romantic story begins in Matsumoto, Japan, where Kusama lived as a child tending to her family's plants in the mountains. As the story goes, one day, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it—the plants, the people, the sky—were covered in polka dots.

The book then moves on to the development of her career in New York in the 1950s, where she had moved to escape the rigidity of her life in Japan. It was in New York at the age of 27 where she gained popularity for her polka dots, the vision of which she brought across the seas.

Weinstein told Dezeen: "I met with associate publisher Charles Kim last August, as Sarah Suzuki – the MoMA curator of drawings and prints – had expressed interest in creating a book for children about Yayoi Kusama. 

"I created several images for the book proposal and once it was approved, Sarah wrote the manuscript for the book and I created the sketch storyboards and then the final art," she continued. "I am a fan of Ms Kusama's work and I read her autobiography and immersed myself in books of her work as well."