Yayoi Kusama, the pioneering Japanese artist whose polka dots, pumpkins and immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms made her one of the world’s most recognisable contemporary artists, has died aged 97.
Kusama died on 14 August at a hospital in Tokyo from multiple organ failure, according to an announcement from the Yayoi Kusama Foundation on Thursday, 27 August. The foundation said Kusama “continued to paint until shortly before her passing, never setting aside her brush”, and “remained steadfast in her lifelong belief that love can save the world”. A funeral has been held privately for close family members, with a public memorial gathering planned for a later date.
Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, in 1929, Kusama began drawing as a child, experiencing visions and hallucinations that informed the repeated nets, dots and organic forms that would recur throughout her career. She left Japan for the US in 1957 and settled in New York the following year. There, she began making Infinity Net paintings, soft sculptures and installations using mirrors and lights that established her within the city’s avant-garde.
By the late 1960s, Kusama had expanded her practice into provocative happenings, often involving nude participants painted with polka dots and combining sexual liberation with anti-war messages. In 1966, she appeared uninvited at the Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden, installing 1,500 reflective silver spheres outside the Italian pavilion and offering them to visitors for $2 each under a sign reading “Your Narcissism for Sale”. Biennale organisers eventually stopped the sale.
Yayoi Kusama with her Narcissus Garden installation at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966
© Yayoi Kusama
Kusama returned permanently to Japan in 1973, where she continued making visual art while also writing fiction and poetry. In 1977, she became a voluntary resident at a mental health hospital in Tokyo, where she lived until the end of her life. Her international reputation grew substantially in subsequent decades, and in 1993—27 years after her unauthorised intervention in Venice—she officially represented Japan at the Biennale.
Her late career brought extraordinary productivity alongside mass popularity. In 2009, Kusama began her My Eternal Soul series—comprising large-scale vibrant, abstract paintings—ultimately producing around 900 works for it before concluding in 2021. After that she embarked on Every Day I Pray for Love, a more intimately scaled series combining her familiar motifs with words and poems.
Her immersive installations meanwhile attracted audiences on a scale rarely seen for a living artist. A 2024–25 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne drew 570,537 visitors, becoming the most attended ticketed exhibition in the museum’s history. David Zwirner, who represented Kusama in the US from 2013, described her at the time of her death as “without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world”.
Hidenori Ota, the founder of Ota Fine Arts and Kusama’s longtime representative in Japan, first worked with the artist in 1988. Speaking to The Art Newspaper on Thursday, Ota recalled that he believed from the outset that Kusama deserved greater international recognition. He sought to position her work within the history of post-war American art and modernism, commissioning the US curator Alexandra Munroe to write about Kusama for a 1988 exhibition at Fuji TV Gallery.
Ota last saw Kusama in late July, when she was in intensive care in hospital. “She was no longer in a condition where she could make work,” he said, although she would respond when spoken to. Ota also went to Kusama’s private funeral, which he said was attended by around 20 to 25 people, primarily relatives from Matsumoto and representatives of the foundation and galleries.
Ota recalled Kusama as an exceptionally strong, serious and straightforward person, shaped in part by having spent her formative teenage years during the Second World War. She possessed an almost “crazy” energy, he says, but was also someone who worked extraordinarily hard.
For Ota, Kusama’s wider legacy lies in her ability to transform aspects of her identity and circumstances that had historically led to marginalisation into sources of strength. As a woman, a Japanese and Asian artist, and someone who openly addressed her mental struggles, Kusama “turned all of these things that were regarded negatively into positive values”, he says.
A major retrospective spanning more than seven decades of Kusama’s work opened at Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland last year before travelling to Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where it closed this month after drawing 480,335 visitors—the most successful exhibition in the museum’s history. Its final presentation opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on 11 September, where the exhibition will now serve as a posthumous tribute to the artist.
