Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, celebrated worldwide for her polka dots, pumpkins, and mirrored “Infinity Rooms,” died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo at the age of 97. Her passing, announced this week by her studio, has prompted tributes from art galleries and fans across the world. So what shaped Kusama’s singular artistic vision, and how did a girl from a small town in Japan become one of the best-selling artists in the world?
Early Life and Hallucinations
Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, a town in Japan’s Nagano prefecture, into a family that ran a plant nursery and seed farm. Her parents had an arranged, loveless marriage, and her mother was often cruel toward her, even going as far as to send young Kusama to spy on her father’s affairs. At around age 10, Kusama began experiencing vivid hallucinations, seeing flowers that spoke to her and patterns that seemed to multiply and swallow her surroundings. She started drawing these visions as a way to cope, and the dots she sketched as a frightened child became the foundation of her life’s work.
Kusama received little formal art education, studying briefly at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts from 1948 to 1949. Feeling constricted by the conservative world of postwar Japan and her family’s wish that she marry rather than pursue art, she looked abroad for a way out.
Moving to New York
In 1957, at 28, Kusama left Japan for the United States, destroying many of her early paintings before she left, partly as a way of breaking free from her past and the restrictive environment surrounding her artistic ambitions. She settled in New York City the following year and busied herself with the city’s avant-garde scene, producing a rapid-fire series of net paintings, soft sculptures, and installations built from used mirrors and lights. Working in a predominantly male art world, she nonetheless earned the respect of artists such as Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell, and her experimental work helped define new categories such as “soft sculptures”—three-dimensional works made from flexible material rather than traditional rigid sculpture—and installation art, which transforms an entire space into an artwork that viewers can physically enter and experience. Despite this recognition, she struggled financially and battled her mental health throughout this period.
Her Signature Vision
Kusama described her guiding philosophy as “self-obliteration,” the idea that obsessive repetition of a simple motif could dissolve the boundary between oneself and the universe. She used polka dots, one of art’s simplest shapes, as a vehicle to explore something limitless, once explaining that she wanted her work to “expand infinitely beyond the edges of the canvas.” This drive produced her Infinity Mirror Rooms, disorienting, endlessly reflective installations that would later become some of the most visited artworks in the world, along with her iconic polka-dotted pumpkin sculptures.
Her work didn’t stay confined to galleries, though. In the late 1960s, Kusama staged unauthorized public performances in New York, including painting dots on the bodies of naked participants as a piece in a museum called Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead, provoking public attention and controversy in equal measure.
Struggles and Return to Japan
By the early 1970s, disillusioned with how art critics had treated her work, Kusama returned to Japan. Although her work had attracted attention within New York’s avant-garde art scene, critics and other art-world professionals often struggled to take her unconventional methods seriously, with her repetitive paintings, installations, and performances usually being dismissed as eccentric or overly provocative rather than for their artistic innovation. The following years brought her much further loss, including the deaths of Joseph Cornell and her father, alongside worsening hallucinations. In 1977, she voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she would live for the rest of her life, walking every day to a nearby studio to continue producing art.
Later Career and Global Recognition
Kusama’s luck shifted in the late 1980s and early 90s, as the international art world revisited her earlier work. In 1993, she became the first woman to represent Japan solo at the Venice Biennale—one of the world’s most prestigious international contemporary art exhibitions, where countries showcase selected artists in national pavilions—a milestone that helped cement her reputation internationally. From then on, her fame only grew: her Infinity Mirror Rooms drew large crowds at institutions such as the Broad in Los Angeles and the Tate Modern, while her pumpkin sculptures generated millions of dollars in auction revenue, including a famous installation on the island of Naoshima. She also collaborated with major fashion houses, and a giant sculpture bearing her likeness was installed outside Louis Vuitton’s headquarters in 2023.
Even in her final years, Kusama never stopped working from her studio. She once vowed to keep making art until the day she died, and even after.
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Legacy and Global Tribute
News of Kusama’s death drew an outpouring of tributes from museums, collectors, and fellow artists, many of whom honored her as one of the most influential and lucrative contemporary artists of her generation. Her gallerist, David Zwirner, confirmed that the cause of her death was multiple organ failure. Kusama leaves behind a body of work that turned personal traumas and hallucinations into a universal artistic language, one that continues to draw millions of visitors into her mirrored, infinite worlds around the globe.
