Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist who spent decades on the periphery of the establishment before becoming one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary art, has died at 97.
The pioneering creator of psychedelic installations and infinity mirror rooms passed away in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August, according to a statement released by her studio. She had been admitted days earlier.
The news sent ripples through the art world and beyond. “Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career,” her studio said. “She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush.”
Kusama spent her final years residing at a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo—a choice she made in 1977 and maintained ever since. Her art was her lifeline. Her hallucinations were her fuel.
A Childhood of Terror and Flowers
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama’s early years were marked by brutality. Her mother was violent. Her father was unfaithful. The family ran plant nurseries, and young Yayoi would escape to sketch flowers—despite her mother’s fierce objections.
The blooms, however, would not leave her alone.
As a child, Kusama began experiencing terrifying hallucinations. Flowers would swarm around her, whisper to her, consume her vision. Rather than crumble, she drew what she saw. This became her coping mechanism, her lifelong defence against a fractured mind.
At 13, during the Second World War, she was conscripted to produce fabric for Japanese army parachutes. Later, she studied nihonga—the traditional Japanese painting style—in Kyoto, but grew frustrated by its constraints. An arranged marriage and domestic life beckoned. She refused.
New York, Scandal, and Recognition
In 1958, Kusama boarded a plane to New York with nothing but ambition and her vivid imagination.
She quickly fell in with Donald Judd, the artist and theorist who would champion her work. Her breakthrough came through “infinity net” paintings—vast canvases smothered in impastoed polka dots that stretched beyond the frame. In 1962, she sold one of these works to Judd and Frank Stella for $75. More than five decades later, her White No. 28 fetched $7.1 million at auction, setting a record for a living female artist.
But Kusama’s time in New York was not confined to studios and galleries. She staged provocations.
Body festivals featuring naked performers smothered in polka dots shocked conservative audiences. She wrote to President Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in exchange for ending the Vietnam War. In 1968, she orchestrated New York’s first “homosexual wedding” in Tribeca. She washed a “dirty” Soviet flag outside the United Nations building to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Her family in Japan was appalled. She didn’t care.
“She always maintained that many of her ideas from this period were appropriated by white male artists,” the Guardian noted, “while she was written out of art history.”
Despite working alongside figures like Andy Warhol, Kusama was never fully embraced by the male-dominated art elite. She resented it. She overcame it.
Darkness, Hospital, and Late-Flowing Fame
Her relationship with Joseph Cornell—the reclusive outsider artist—offered one bright spot. It was platonic, intense, obsessive. When Cornell died in 1972, Kusama’s mental health collapsed. Hallucinations intensified. Panic attacks multiplied. Suicide attempts followed.
In 1977, she checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital that offered art therapy. She made it her permanent home. Each day, she walked to a nearby studio and worked from morning until night.
Interest in her work appeared to vanish by the early 1990s. She published novels. She painted. She waited.
The recognition that had eluded her for decades arrived, eventually, with force. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with a mirrored room filled with small pumpkin sculptures—a motif that had haunted her since childhood, when she first saw a pumpkin with her grandfather and believed it spoke to her. The work won universal praise.
From then on, Kusama became unstoppable. Retrospectives at MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Hirshhorn Museum drew massive crowds. Her infinity mirror rooms—where coloured lights and reflections created the illusion of endless space—became Instagram sensations. Visitors queued for hours for a 30-second experience inside her installations. At a Washington exhibition in 2017, authorities briefly shut down a show after visitors damaged artwork while snapping selfies.
Yet despite her popularity—she may have been the world’s most sought-after living artist—Kusama never considered herself part of the club.
“I cannot imagine how I will be classified after my death,” she once said. “It feels good to be an outsider.”
She kept that edge until the end.
Why it Matters
Kusama’s death marks the close of a singular chapter in modern art. She was a survivor—of childhood abuse, of mental illness, of an art world that dismissed her for decades before inevitably embracing her. Her legacy isn’t simply the polka dots or the pumpkins or the endless mirror rooms; it’s the proof that outsider vision, stubbornly pursued, can reshape mainstream culture itself. In an era when mental health struggles are still stigmatised, Kusama normalised the notion that torment and brilliance can coexist. She proved that the hallucinations many would medicate away can become the foundation for universal beauty. The queues outside her exhibitions, the millions paid for her canvases, the millions more who simply stood inside her mirrored rooms and felt, for a moment, infinite—these are her monuments. She leaves behind an art world transformed and a question every creator must now ask themselves: what would I risk for my vision?
