Yayoi Kusama's Flower Garden (1989) places a large butterfly at the centre of the image, its wings spread wide and covered in multiple distinct marking systems — pink and white sections carrying a network of fine lines, yellow circles arranged in rows, dots of different sizes, teal and orange accents — the insect rendered with the same obsessive attention to surface that Kusama brings to every form she depicts. The butterfly dominates the upper half of the image, its body in red with a spiral antenna curling to the left, its wings extending almost to both edges of the sheet. It rests on a pink flower in the lower left, which along with two other blooms — one orange, one pink — occupies the lower portion of the image, each flower covered in dots and linear marks, their stamens rendered in orange and red with individual dot sequences.

The black ground above and around the butterfly is covered in a yellow structure of irregular leaf-like shapes — a dense, almost foliage-like field that gives the image the atmosphere of a night garden, the butterfly illuminated against the surrounding darkness. The combination of butterfly and flower connects this to the long tradition of Japanese decorative art — from Edo period woodblock prints through to Meiji lacquerwork, the pairing of insect and bloom was one of the most established structural subjects, carrying associations of transience, beauty and the natural world's cycles. Kusama grew up surrounded by the plant and insect life of her family's nursery in Matsumoto, and that early immersion in the natural world runs through the flower and butterfly works as a biographical undercurrent beneath the dot vocabulary.

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