Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist whose obsessive dots, nets, pumpkins and mirrored rooms grew from intensely personal visions into some of the most recognizable images in contemporary art, died at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at the age of 97. Her death was announced on August 27 by companies representing the artist, which said she continued painting until her final days.
Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, in 1929, Kusama began drawing and painting as a child. She later said she experienced visions and hallucinations from an early age, including fields of dots, flowers and repeated patterns that seemed to spread across her surroundings. Rather than remaining private experiences, those visions became the foundation of an artistic vocabulary she would develop over nearly eight decades.
Kusama grew up near her family's plant nursery in Matsumoto and began experimenting with watercolor, pastel and oil painting while still young. Her childhood and family life were difficult, and art increasingly became both an outlet and a means of confronting the images that appeared in her mind. She would later describe artistic creation as essential to her survival.
After World War II, Kusama went to Kyoto at about the age of 19 to study Nihonga, the traditional modern Japanese painting style. Although formally trained in established Japanese techniques, she became dissatisfied with convention and increasingly pursued abstraction and her own repetitive visual language.
Her ambitions soon extended beyond Japan. Kusama left for the United States in 1957 and settled in New York the following year, entering an art world that was undergoing a dramatic transformation through Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, performance and conceptual art. She was one of relatively few Japanese women attempting to establish an avant-garde career in New York at the time.
In New York, Kusama began exhibiting what became known as her Infinity Net paintings, large canvases covered with countless repeated arcs and loops. The works transformed simple marks into seemingly endless surfaces and established repetition as one of the defining principles of her art.
Her practice quickly expanded beyond painting. She produced soft sculptures in which furniture and other everyday objects were covered with repeated protruding forms, then developed installations using mirrors, electric lights and duplicated objects. These experiments eventually led to the Infinity Mirror Rooms for which she became internationally famous.
Her 1965 work Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field used mirrors to multiply repeated sculptural forms into what appeared to be an endless environment. The work turned the repetition of her paintings into a physical experience, placing the viewer inside an apparently limitless visual field.
Kusama described an important concept behind her work as "self-obliteration," in which repeated motifs such as dots spread across bodies, objects and surrounding space until the distinction between the individual and the environment seems to disappear. The idea became central not only to her paintings but also to her installations, performances, photography and films.
During the 1960s, she became an increasingly visible figure in New York's avant-garde circles, working at the same time as artists including Andy Warhol and Allan Kaprow. Her activities ranged far beyond conventional exhibitions. She staged body-painting events, fashion shows and public "happenings," made films and published material of her own.
She also used performance as a form of political expression. During the Vietnam War era, Kusama organized anti-war happenings in which nudity, body painting and repeated dots were used to challenge social conventions and attract public attention. The performances added to her notoriety and reinforced her image as an artist willing to blur the boundaries between art, politics and everyday life.
Despite her visibility, Kusama's years in the United States were not a straightforward path to commercial success. She struggled financially and lived through periods in which recognition did not bring corresponding security. Her later worldwide fame would therefore represent a remarkable reversal for an artist who had once worked on the margins of the New York art establishment.
Kusama returned permanently to Japan in 1973. Rather than abandoning art, she broadened her creative work, producing poetry and fiction as well as paintings and sculpture. She later voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and maintained a routine in which she continued creating work from a nearby studio.
Her literary career also earned recognition. In 1983, Kusama received a literary award for new writers from the magazine Yasei Jidai for her novel Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street, demonstrating that her creative identity extended well beyond visual art.
From the late 1980s and particularly through the 1990s, international interest in Kusama's earlier work grew sharply. Museums, curators and younger artists increasingly reassessed her role in postwar art, and she moved from relative obscurity in Japan to renewed prominence overseas.
A major turning point came in 1993, when she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. She became the first woman to receive a solo presentation at the Japanese Pavilion, a milestone that helped establish her international revival.
Over the following decades, Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms became among the most popular installation works in contemporary museums. Visitors entered enclosed spaces in which lights, mirrors, pumpkins or other objects appeared to multiply without end, giving physical form to the themes of infinity and repetition she had explored since childhood.
The pumpkin also became one of her most familiar motifs. Often covered with contrasting dots, Kusama's pumpkins appeared in paintings, sculptures and large outdoor installations and helped take her work beyond galleries into public spaces.
Her distinctive appearance became part of her public identity as well. With her bright red bobbed hair and clothing frequently covered in dots or patterns matching her artworks, Kusama increasingly appeared almost as an extension of the visual environments she created.
Her influence extended into fashion and popular culture. Collaborations with major brands, including Louis Vuitton, placed her dots and other motifs on clothing, handbags and storefronts, giving her work a degree of mass recognition unusual for a contemporary artist.
At the same time, her market value rose sharply. One of her paintings sold for $10.5 million in 2022, reflecting the extraordinary growth in demand for work by an artist who had spent parts of her early career struggling financially.
Kusama continued producing work on a vast scale well into old age. She began her My Eternal Soul painting series in 2009 and continued it until 2021, producing roughly 900 paintings. She then launched another series, Every Day I Pray for Love, in 2021.
Her work repeatedly returned to themes of life, death, love, nature and infinity. While the brilliant colors and playful forms of her art made it widely accessible, the underlying ideas often originated in anxiety, hallucination, fear of death and an attempt to dissolve the boundaries of the self.
Recognition in Japan eventually matched her international standing. Among numerous honors, Kusama received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, and the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2006. She was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 2009 and received Japan's Order of Culture in 2016.
The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in 2017, creating a permanent institution dedicated to presenting her work and ideas.
Her exhibitions continued drawing enormous audiences around the world. An exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne from December 2024 through April 2025 displayed about 200 works, including Infinity Mirror Rooms and outdoor installations, and attracted more than 570,000 visitors, setting an attendance record for the museum.
Kusama remained professionally active into 2026. Exhibitions of her work were held at Museum Ludwig in Cologne from March through August, while the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo staged KUSAMA's POP from April through August. Another exhibition was scheduled to open at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in September.
Her representatives said that even near the end of her life, Kusama continued painting and pursuing the ideas that had occupied her for decades, particularly eternal love and the enduring nature of the soul.
Kusama ultimately transformed experiences that had frightened and overwhelmed her as a child into an artistic language understood around the world. Dots that once appeared to engulf her surroundings became monumental sculptures, paintings and mirrored universes visited by millions.
Across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, fashion, poetry and fiction, she built one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern Japanese art and became one of the rare Japanese artists whose imagery was immediately recognizable far beyond the traditional art world.
Her own hope was that this creative life would continue beyond her death. In remarks made during her lifetime, Kusama expressed the wish that people would continue loving her art after she was gone — a fitting final message from an artist who spent much of her career trying to turn the finite experience of an individual life into something that appeared infinite.
Source: The Asahi Shimbun Company
