Yayoi Kusama's Sunflower (1989) takes the most Van Gogh-associated of all flowers and renders it in two extraordinary configurations — one red and flame-like in the upper portion of the image, one pink and concentric in the lower half, each treated as a completely different formal problem whilst sharing the same black ground covered in a blue network of leaf-like marks. The upper sunflower is red, its petals sharp and pointed like flames radiating outward from a centre of concentric rings in yellow and blue, the innermost ring carrying a kidney-shaped mark in deep blue that gives the centre an almost eye-like quality. The petals are covered in white dot marks on red, the effect giving them a feathered texture that pushes the flower away from botanical description and toward something more heraldic.

The lower flower is pink, its petals broader and more conventionally sunflower-like, its centre in concentric circles of blue and white dots radiating outward from a white core — the same radial idea as the Sunlights work but here contained within a recognisable flower head. A large green leaf extends to the right, covered in a yellow network of lines that maps its surface in fine detail. Van Gogh painted sunflowers in Arles in 1888 with an urgency that came from his awareness of their transience — the cut flowers wilting as he worked, the paintings a race against the decay of the subject. Kusama approaches the same flower from the opposite direction entirely: where Van Gogh's impasto captured the physical weight of the petals, Kusama covers every surface in marks that preserve the flower in a state of perpetual present, dotted surface applied so thoroughly that nothing can wilt or change — the sunflower held in pattern, permanent and unrepeatable at the same time.

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