Yayoi Kusama, Japan’s ‘Queen of Polka Dots’, Dies at 97

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, one of the most internationally recognised contemporary artists, has died at the age of 97.

Kusama, famous for her distinctive polka-dot paintings, pumpkin sculptures and immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms, died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo after suffering multiple organ failure, according to a statement from her company released on Thursday.

“Until the very end, she never put down her paintbrush, continuing to explore eternal love and the soul,” the statement said.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama experienced a difficult childhood and began creating art at an early age.

She turned the hallucinations she experienced into colourful and repetitive artistic patterns involving dots, nets, swirls and infinity motifs.

Speaking to reporters in 2017, Kusama explained that she continued to experience hallucinations, describing dots appearing across her clothes, floors, ceilings and surroundings.

Painting these visions became a central part of her artistic expression.

After studying art in Japan, Kusama moved to the United States in the late 1950s and quickly became an important figure in New York’s avant-garde art scene.

She exhibited her net paintings and soft sculptures and staged provocative body-painting performances, including events intended to protest the Vietnam War.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. Four years later, she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she lived for the remainder of her life.

She maintained a nearby studio and continued travelling there regularly to produce her artwork.
Her repetitive patterns, particularly her signature polka dots, became the defining feature of her work.

The motifs appeared on paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations, helping create the immersive environments for which she became famous.

“Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos,” Kusama once wrote, a phrase that reflected her fascination with infinity and the universe.

In her later years, Kusama became a global art celebrity. She collaborated with major fashion brands, including Louis Vuitton, while her distinctive visual style and likeness appeared on products ranging from clothing and accessories to household items and retail displays.

Her exhibitions attracted enormous international audiences, while her works reached increasingly high prices at auction. Her 1959 painting Untitled (Nets) sold for $10.5 million in 2022.

In 2016, Kusama received Japan’s Order of Culture, one of the country’s highest honours for artists.
David Zwirner, the art dealer who represented Kusama for 15 years, described her as “without a doubt the most famous living artist in the world” at the time of her death.

He said Kusama’s work had played an important role in shaping the histories of minimalism, pop art and performance art.

Through her extraordinary career, Kusama transformed deeply personal experiences and hallucinations into a distinctive artistic language that captivated audiences around the world.

Her colourful dots, pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms ultimately made her one of the most influential and recognisable artists of the modern era.

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