Yayoi Kusama's Flower Basket (1993) takes the most classical of still life formats — the flower-filled basket, a subject with roots in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish botanical illustration — and submits it entirely to her marking system, every element covered in a different arrangement of dots, lines and rectangular patterns. The yellow basket dominates the lower two-thirds of the image, its woven body rendered in a dense brick-like rectangular pattern, its arching handle in a similar system of small yellow marks against black. Inside and rising above it, yellow daisy-like flowers on green stems carry dot sequences along each petal, a large red bloom with white dots occupies the centre, and smaller red star-shaped flowers extend to either side beyond the basket's rim.

Each element carries its own distinct marking vocabulary — the petals in dots, the stems in a tight network of small marks, the basket body in its rectangular weave pattern, the red blooms in larger white dots on red. The black ground is covered in a white network of irregular shapes extending across the full field, the marks larger and more open than in some works of this period, the background giving the image a quality closer to stained glass than to the dense packed grounds of the pumpkin series. A green foreground carries its own larger network of lines, the surface above the basket treated as a distinct zone with its own marking system.

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