Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist who became a global superstar, dies aged 97

Yayoi Kusama, the Polka-Dot Maverick Who Outlived Every Expectation, Dead at 97

Wanderstayfinder.com – The world lost one of its most visually unmistakable artists on 14 August, when Yayoi Kusama passed away in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 97. Her management company, Yayoi Kusama Inc, confirmed the death in a statement released on Thursday, describing a life spent almost exclusively in the service of making art. The announcement framed her decades-long trajectory as one of relentless creative output spanning painting, sculpture, performance, fiction, and poetry.

“Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry.”

The statement added that she kept painting right up until her final days, never putting down her brush, and that she continued exploring themes of “forever love and eternal soul.” The company pledged to honour her wishes by using her work to offer “hope and strength for the future to people around the world.”

A Life Forged in Matsumoto

Kusama entered the world in 1929 in Matsumoto, a mountain town in Japan’s Nagano prefecture, into a household that offered little warmth. Her mother was domineering and frequently cruel; her father drifted between affairs. The family’s wealth came from operating plant nurseries, and young Kusama spent hours sketching the blooms her parents cultivated, often against her mother’s wishes. What made her childhood singular was the onset of vivid hallucinations: flowers would multiply across her vision, swarm around her, and even speak. Drawing became her survival strategy — a way to externalise the overwhelming sensory flood.

By the age of 13, wartime conscription pulled her into producing fabric for Japanese army parachutes. After the conflict ended, she enrolled in Kyoto to study nihonga, the classical Japanese painting tradition. The rigid conventions of that school quickly frustrated her. She rejected the arranged marriage and domestic future her family had mapped out for her and, in 1958, boarded a plane for New York.

New York, the Sixties, and the Birth of a Visual Language

In Manhattan she found a kindred spirit in Donald Judd, the sculptor and theorist who would become a lifelong collaborator and confidant. Her breakthrough came through the “infinity net” canvases — enormous fields of thickly impasted dots that seemed to pulse outward from the surface. In 1962 she sold her first such work to Judd and fellow artist Frank Stella for a modest $75. That same painting lineage would, decades later, fetch $7.1 million (£5.7 million) at auction in 2014 when White No 28 crossed the block, setting a then-record price for a living female artist.

The following year she turned to what she called “soft sculptures”: household objects and furniture draped in white, fabric-stuffed phallic forms. She described these pieces as an attempt to work through a deep-seated revulsion toward sex, a feeling instilled by a upbringing that treated the body as dirty and shameful. Though her practice brushed against the edges of pop art and minimalism, the institutional art world largely refused to embrace her. She maintained, consistently and without apology, that white male artists — Andy Warhol among them — had absorbed her ideas while erasing her from the historical record.

Self-Obliteration and the Infinite

Central to her entire output was the concept of “self-obliteration,” a dissolution of the individual ego into an endless pattern. She traced the idea back to a 1954 painting, Flower (DSPS), and described the experience in terms that remain startlingly vivid:

“I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.”

At the 1966 Venice Biennale she pushed the concept into physical space with Narcissus Garden: a shallow “lake” filled with 1,500 mirrored balls, each one a tiny infinity mirror. When she began selling the spheres for two dollars apiece under the placard “Your narcissism for sale,” curators moved to shut the operation down. The episode crystallised her reputation as an artist who treated controversy not as a risk but as a method.

Performance, Scandal, and Political Provocation

Throughout the hippie-era sixties and into the seventies, Kusama staged a series of performance pieces she called “happenings.” Some involved nude performers coated in polka dots in what she termed “body festivals.” In one widely circulated episode she wrote directly to President Richard Nixon, offering to sleep with him in exchange for an end to the Vietnam War. Her conservative relatives in Japan were appalled by reports of such antics. In 1968 she organised what was billed as New York’s first “homosexual wedding” at the Tribe nightclub, a gesture that critics at the time dismissed as mere shock value but that now reads as decades ahead of its cultural moment.

From Obscurity to Global Superstardom

After the sixties, Kusama faded from the Western art circuit for years. She spent long stretches of her later life in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, a fact she discussed openly and which added another layer to her mythology. Yet the themes she had pioneered — repetition, infinity, the dissolution of boundaries — proved remarkably durable. The arrival of social media and the selfie culture of the 2010s and 2020s gave her “infinity mirror room” installations a new, massive audience. Visitors queued for hours to photograph themselves inside rooms lined with mirrors and coloured lights, effectively performing the self-obliteration she had theorised half a century earlier.

The culmination of that late-career surge came in 2024, when a major Kusama exhibition in Australia drew the largest crowds of any show in the country’s recorded history. By then she was instantly identifiable by her bright red bobbed wig, a visual signature as fixed as the polka dots themselves.

Kusama’s death closes a chapter that began in a flower nursery in the Japanese Alps and ended in a Tokyo hospital room, with a brush still in hand. The work she left behind — paintings, sculptures, installations, performances, novels, poems — continues to operate in galleries and museums worldwide, and her company has committed to keeping that operation alive. The dots, as ever, go on.