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Artist known for her dazzling polka-dotted paintings and infinity mirror room installations
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Art and design — Christopher Masters
The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has died aged 97, created an exhilarating oeuvre of polka-dotted paintings, stuffed cloth phalloi and provocative happenings, films and installations, as well as a curate’s egg of novels and poetry. Kusama’s autobiography, Infinity Net (2002), relates her work directly to the obsessions and neuroses from which she suffered throughout her life: “From my very earliest memories, I have felt imprisoned by the walls of my eyes and ears and heart, upon which have been emblazoned all manner of things – nature, the universe, people and blood and flowers…. The only way for me to elude these furtive appearances is to recreate them visually with paint, pen or pencil in an attempt to decipher what they are.”
When she first arrived in New York in the late 1950s, critics and fellow artists praised her originality. Kusama’s friend Donald Judd , the minimalist artist, described her as transcending “whatever ... is oriental or American” but nonetheless emphasised her shallow pictorial space and other formal qualities associated with contemporary art in New York.
Kusama characterised her own work in a letter to the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe as “oriental mystic symbolism”. More recently, feminist writers such as Izumi Nakajima have discussed her highly original response to her identity as an Asian woman in a white male art world.
Most interpretations of Kusama’s career have relied, at least partly, on examining her tortuous early life. She was born into a provincial bourgeois family that had made its fortune from cultivating nursery seedlings, at Matsumoto, in the mountainous Nagano prefecture north-west of Tokyo. Her father, Kamon, was a man of “extravagant and incorrigible profligacy”, she wrote, to which Kusama attributed many of her psychological problems. Her mother, Shigeru, “perpetually angry” and bitterly opposed to Yayoi becoming an artist, also played her part.
Kusama still managed to pursue her painting, compensating for the shortage of canvases in 40s Japan by reusing pieces of plant sacks and gaining inspiration from the brilliantly coloured flowers cultivated by her family. Her creativity was already linked to disturbing hallucinations: even the violets she depicted had a tendency to adopt human characteristics or to attach themselves to her.
As she was to write in her poem Violet Obsession (1978), “One day suddenly my voice / became the voice of a violet / … The violets on the tablecloth break free / and crawl over my body /... O violets, little flowers – don’t talk to me / Give me back the voice that became a violet’s voice / I don’t want to be an adult – not yet.”
This inability to distinguish herself from her surroundings was to be the principal reason for Kusama’s famous obsession with the polka dot. This apparently harmless motif became in her hands a weapon of “self-obliteration”, spreading like measles across much of her work. It created a powerful effect of formlessness and loss of individuality, whether appearing on paintings, sculptures or even the human body – her own or other people’s.
Although generally associated with later phases in Kusama’s career, coloured dots had first appeared in a drawing of a woman, apparently her mother, which the budding artist made when she was 10 years old. By the early 50s Kusama was producing striking abstract watercolours such as Infinity Polka Dots (Red) of 1951, together with more obviously surrealist works that seemed to present simultaneous visions of both microscopic and cosmic reality.
Naturally enough for a youthful follower of surrealism, Kusama followed a disappointing period at the Kyoto Art Academy from 1948 to 1951 with an application to study in Paris. She almost went there, but instead the breakthrough of having solo exhibitions in Japan during the 50s spurred her towards an even bolder ambition – to move to America.
This aspiration motivated Kusama to begin her long-lasting correspondence with O’Keeffe, who combined encouragement with a dash of realism about working in the US – “It seems to me very odd that you are so ambitious to show your painting here, but I wish the best for you.” The advice did not cool Kusama’s ardour, and eventually, in November 1957, she boarded a plane to Seattle, moving after six months to New York.
Although initially living in extreme poverty, Kusama quickly made contact with key artistic figures, from the reclusive Joseph Cornell, who stimulated her long-lasting interest in collage, to Andy Warhol. For someone so apparently ill-adjusted, she was in perfect accord with the zeitgeist of the 1960s. Her Accumulation sculptures – mundane, often domestic objects covered with stuffed cloth penises – fitted neatly into early exhibitions of pop art, as well as expressing the sexual neurosis she blamed on her repressive upbringing and her father’s philandering.
Even more brilliantly, later in the decade Kusama became a star of the hippy movement, choreographing a succession of naked happenings and parties, which appear in her art-house movie Kusama’s Self-obliteration (1967). She supported her “make love, not war” message with her own psychedelic fashion designs, including a “Party Dress” accommodating up to 25 people and a “Homo Dress” with a strategic cut-out section. She offered to sleep with the US president Richard Nixon if he ended the Vietnam war.
And then, in 1973, she went home to Japan. She tried her hand at art dealing but, within four years, checked herself into the psychiatric facility in Tokyo where she would live for the rest of her life. Despite a period of relative obscurity, she reasserted herself through a succession of autobiographical novels, from Manhattan Suicide Addict (1978) to The Psychological Hospital of Ants (1994). Her art, particularly her earlier work, began to climb in value, eventually exceeding the level of $10m at auction.
Spectacular sculptures of vegetal and floral forms, adorning public sites such as the railway station in Lille, were accompanied in the last two decades by optically dazzling paintings made in Kusama’s studio opposite her clinic. Constellations of eyes and her own profile populate numerous luridly coloured canvases, some of which appeared in 2012 at the Victoria Miro Gallery and Tate Modern in London, and then in New York, Paris and Madrid.
The show culminated in a characteristic installation, an Infinity Mirrord Room, repeating an effect that Kusama had first created in 1965. Here the visitor was able to experience the artist’s most potent metaphor for the endlessness of the cosmos, a universe in which the individual’s identity is perpetually obliterated.
More recently, this work was revived in 2021 for an even more successful exhibition at Tate, which also contained a room consisting of infinitely reflected, rotating chandeliers. Entitled Chandelier of Grief, it displayed the existential aspects of Kusama’s art. In contrast, her simultaneous collaborations with Louis Vuitton combined an assortment of polka-dot garments and accessories with a waving Kusama robot in the shop window.
In 2006, she was awarded the Japanese Praemium Imperiale for painting, and in 2017 a Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo.
• Yayoi Kusama, artist and writer, born 22 March 1929; died 14 August 2026
When she first arrived in New York in the late 1950s, critics and fellow artists praised her originality. Kusama’s friend Donald Judd , the minimalist artist, described her as transcending “whatever ... is oriental or American” but nonetheless emphasised her shallow pictorial space and other formal qualities associated with contemporary art in New York.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Christopher Masters. Published 27 Aug 2026, 01:52 pm.
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