Visionary or operator the kind of question that habitually surrounds Yayoi Kusama, Japanese pioneer of happenings, feminist art, and installation art, and veteran of New York’s 1960s counterculture. She has claimed her trademark polka dots — which in the course of her career she has applied to any variety of surfaces, including paintings, balloons, naked bodies, and trees — derive from hallucinatory experiences in early bouts of the mental illness that continues to shape her life.

Her prints, the subject of their first exclusive American exhibition at Peter Blum’s SoHo gallery this summer, are unlikely to resolve the issue, as they seem equally touched and canny in their compulsiveness and intensity. Ms. Kusama has been a prolific printmaker since the early 1980s. She daringly immigrated to America in her early 30s following a correspondence with her idol, Georgia O’Keeffe. She returned to Japan, following a health breakdown in 1973, and now lives as a voluntary boarder in a Tokyo mental institution.

Many of these prints, especially the early ones, are innocuous but commercial-seeming ventures: They are joyous, playful, charming images but are far from the subversiveness of her daring love-ins on Wall Street and at the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden in the1960s. Her launch in printmaking belongs to a relatively quiet period between her early notoriety in New York and her relaunch in the international scene when she represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

“Pumpkin” (1982), the lithograph that opens this survey, is classic Kusama. The motif is a favorite one, its voluptuous shape recurring in paintings and sculptures. A pulsating array in black and yellow, it is drawn with flattened-out, stylized simplicity, with the dots bigger along the ribs, and a fraction of that size elsewhere on the surface of the vegetable. The pumpkin is set against a lattice ground of irregular leaf shapes — reversing the ratio of yellow to black — a texture the artist calls “infinity nets.” At the top and bottom of the composition are bright red zigzag stripes with tiny white dots.

Other 1980s prints that place polka-dotted motifs against “infinity net” grounds include the silkscreens “Butterfly” (1985) and “Watermelon” (1986). These are rather delightful works, but their gaudiness is culturally perplexing: They do not seem deliberately kitsch in either a Pop or postmodern way, nor are they “outsider” in feel. If you did not know that they were the work of a sometime avatar of the avant-garde and a woman with a history of mental illness, you might take their sweet, childlike quality as mainstream decorative art. “City” (1989) has a bunch of dotted flowers float on a red ground with stencil-cut towers and steeples along the base: It could be a popular print made anywhere in the previous half century.

Soon after this work, the display literally and metaphorically turns a corner. “Disappointment” (1994) eschews color and representation and marks a new tone of seriousness. It is an all-over abstraction of obsessive white lines against a gray ground. It could loosely have derived from an “infinity net” but it derives its hypnotic, slightly tantric effect from a fuzzy irresolution that makes the lines shimmer on the retina. They slightly resemble leaf veins or fibers observed under a microscope, with thinner lines within thicker ones observing a loose but organic logic.

When butterflies, pumpkins, and flowers return among the 1990s prints, they seem chastened by Ms. Kusama’s embrace of abstraction. In etchings, for instance, it is not just that they are monochrome; they actually seem to have hardened into more intensely focused, serial, schematic motifs, and to have lost their childlike frivolity.

Later prints, like the screenprint “Town” (1999), fuse abstraction, older motifs, and vibrant color to psychedelic effect. The yellow and black dots here form a loose grid that looks like it is being pulled and stretched out of kilter, a sort of jazzed-up Bridget Riley. Other recent prints revisit earlier subjects with newfound effects. “Pumpkin P” and “Pumpkin G” (both 1999) prettily deploy glitter in the silkscreen process, for instance. “Sex Obsession” (2003) explores the all-over meditative labor intensity of the abstract fields from a decade earlier in uninked embossed paper, in an image of persuasive elegance.

Even if the hallucinations that originally launched their author in this decorative direction have long since, and mercifully, been contained, these works are handsome souvenirs of that original, extreme impetus — hallucinations recollected in printmaking tranquility.

Until July 28 (99 Wooster St., between Spring and Prince streets, 212-343-0441).