Yayoi Kusama's Lemon Squash (5) (1999) takes the same subject as Lemon Squash (2) — the tall glass with straw and lemon slice — and renders it in a completely different palette, yellow and red replacing the green and yellow of the earlier version, the image transformed by the colour shift into something warmer and more insistent. The glass is yellow against a saturated red ground, the marks that cover it rendered in red against yellow — dots scaling from small at the top to large circles at the base, a brick-like band across the middle, the straw in a diagonal grid pattern, the lemon slice on the rim in a fine network of lines. The foreground above the glass is yellow with a red rectangular brick pattern extending across the full width of the image, and the red ground behind is covered in a blue network of irregular lines — so the image uses four distinct colours across five different zones, each one governed by its own marking system.

The connection to Pop Art is impossible to ignore and was never accidental. Kusama was in New York in the early 1960s at the same moment Warhol was making his Campbell's Soup Cans and Lichtenstein his comic-book panels — the consumer object elevated into high art, the everyday image stripped of context and submitted to formal examination. Kusama's response to the same cultural moment was characteristically different: where Warhol flattened and multiplied, she covered and activated, the glass of lemon squash not reproduced but inhabited by pattern until it becomes something other than an illustration of a drink.

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