Yayoi Kusama's Dandelions (1985) takes one of the most common of all wildflowers — the weed that grows in every pavement crack and garden border — and covers it in the same systematic attention she brings to the pumpkin and the net, the dandelions spreading diagonally across the image against a deep black ground covered in a pink network of irregular lines. Five plants are distributed across the image, their serrated leaves in bright green covered in dense rows of small marks that follow the jagged outline of each leaf, the yellow flower heads in orange-yellow with darker orange dot centres, the stems rising in thin straight lines from the base of each plant. The leaves push outward in all directions, the arrangement suggesting plants growing in a patch rather than arranged in a vase, the image horizontal and ground-hugging in the way dandelions actually grow.

The choice of subject is quietly significant. The dandelion is not a garden flower — it is a weed, a plant that grows without invitation, that spreads through a mechanism of dispersal rather than cultivation, its seeds carried by the wind across surfaces it has not been planted in. This connects to the practice of Kusama's all-over mark-making, which similarly spreads across every surface it encounters without discrimination, mark structure applied to the dandelion with the same thoroughness it is applied to the pumpkin, the shoe, the hat, the watermelon. The black ground is covered in a pink network of irregular lines — a warm, unusual combination that gives the darkness a different quality from the black grounds of other works in her output, the pink lines visible at a distance and giving the surface a faint warmth that contrasts with the coolness of the green leaves in front of it.

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