Yayoi Kusama 1929-2026 - An Appreciation

Yayoi Kusama was an outsider who went on to become one of the most famous artists on the planet. By the end of her life, a polka dot was no longer just a pattern, a pumpkin no longer just a vegetable, a mirrored room no longer a rectangular or square space. They had become Kusama: immediately understood, endlessly reproducible, but yet, somehow still strange and affecting.

The prettiness of her work could sometimes obscure the severity of its message. Her art repeatedly asks the same unsettling question: What happens when the self is repeated so many times that it disappears?

For Kusama, the repetition in her work was a method of confronting fear. The act of making another dot, and then another, could become a way of imposing order on an overwhelming visual and psychological universe.

Her work eventually became synonymous with the rise of Instagram. Indeed, her career’s output seemed tailor made for the grid –a series of dots, nets, mirrors, flowers and pumpkins, and the sense of self identity that characterised her work right from the start. As such, she was perfect for our moment, and she became the top selling contemporary artist in her lifetime.

She died in Tokyo on August 14, at 97, having lived in a psychiatric hospital, in order to best manage her personal health and practice, for the past few decades. Announcing her death this week, her studio said that “she had remained devoted to artistic creation until the end.”

Kusama first experienced hallucinations as a child in Matsumoto, Japan. She saw patterns overwhelm the world around her; flowers and other objects seemed to speak. She began translating those visions into drawings.

Her mother opposed her artistic ambitions, but Kusama persisted, eventually leaving Japan for New York in 1957, believing America would offer the freedom not available at home.

New York wasn’t exactly welcoming. She arrived with little money and entered an art scene dominated by men, abstraction and huge personalities.

Alone among them, Donald Judd, then an influential critic and later her friend, recognized the force of what he saw. He called her an “original painter” and praised her work as “advanced and remarkable,” an early acknowledgment that this newcomer to the avant garde was intent on upending it.

In 1959 she exhibited her first New York series of Infinity Nets, paintings composed of obsessive webs of tiny marks, microscopic and at the same time almost cosmic. In the 1960s she staged nude events that were part provocation, part antiwar protest, part feminist intervention and part very deliberate publicity.

She multiplied dots across paintings and furniture. She multiplied phallic forms across sofas and boats. She multiplied herself through performances and “happenings.”

At the 1966 Venice Biennale, without an official invitation, she installed Narcissus Garden: 1,500 mirrored spheres that she offered to visitors for $2 apiece. It was art, commerce, spectacle and self-promotion all wrapped up together.

Kusama understood something about attention before the attention economy existed.
The young artist was also painfully conscious of appropriation. She believed some of her male contemporaries had borrowed ideas from her without giving her sufficient credit.

Her suspicions were not always easily separable from the psychological difficulties she was experiencing, but the underlying historical problem was real: women and artists working outside the established centres of power often watched others receive recognition for innovations they themselves pioneered, as our Contemporary Artist Series book Yayoi Kusama and the books Great Women Artists, Great Women Painters, Great Women Sculptors, and the forthcoming Great Women Photographers richly explore.

By the 1970s, Kusama returned to Japan. After suicide attempts and worsening mental-health struggles, she entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1977 and eventually made it her permanent residence. 

She continued working from a studio near the hospital. She painted, sculpted, wrote novels and poetry, and developed the visual language that would eventually make her ubiquitous. Her psychiatric treatment, her isolation, her obsessive practices and her extraordinary discipline existed alongside one another and fed into, rather than hindered, her artistic output.

Her great late-career triumph was the Infinity Mirror Room. The basic idea was simple, almost childlike: mirrors, lights, repetition. But the effect on anyone lucky enough to experience it in person in galleries and museums across the world was positively metaphysical.

When you entered one of the rooms the boundaries between body and environment seemed to completely dissolve; you became one point among many. It might seem lazy to suggest the effect was akin to a psychedelic experience, but it would be true. The room became the universe, the viewer became infinitely important and, at the same time, cosmically insignificant.

That transformation made Kusama perfectly suited to the age of the smartphone. Visitors queued for hours to spend moments inside her installations, emerging with photographs that effectively turned themselves into extensions of the artwork.

For many it would be their first taste of public art, many of them will have been changed profounddly by the experience.

Kusama took experiences that might have isolated her, the hallucinations, the obsessive thoughts, the sense of being swallowed by patterns, and transformed them into a language understood and shared by millions. In so doing she became one of the most recognizable artist-personas of the modern era. 

The red wig, the polka dots, the sunglasses, the pumpkins, the gesamtkunstwerk theatricality of her public image. She understood that an artist could become an icon, and that an artwork could exist simultaneously in a museum, on a fashion collaboration, on a tote bag and inside someone's phone.

The official death statement from her studio said that she continued to explore “eternal love and the soul until the end”. But the most concise description of her very many achievements was her own.

She once said, “I was given a sad life by fate, but I think I won a happy life.”