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

Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital, her company announced on Thursday. She was 97. For seven decades, she had transformed hallucinations into art—vivid, obsessive, endlessly multiplying patterns that began as a child's coping mechanism and became the visual language of the contemporary museum. By the time she died, she had become perhaps the world's most recognizable living artist, her infinity mirror rooms drawing crowds who would queue for hours to spend thirty seconds inside them, their phones raised to capture the infinite reflections.

Kusama was born in Matsumoto in 1929 into a wealthy family that managed plant nurseries. Her childhood was marked by an abusive mother and an unfaithful father. She drew constantly, despite her mother's attempts to stop her, and as a young girl began experiencing hallucinations in which the flowers she sketched would swarm around her and speak. Drawing became her way of making sense of what she saw. During the Second World War, at thirteen, she was conscripted to produce fabric for Japanese army parachutes. Later she studied nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, in Kyoto, but found its constraints suffocating. She rejected the life her family had planned for her—an arranged marriage, children—and left Japan for New York in 1958.

In New York, Kusama fell in with the artist and theorist Donald Judd and developed her signature "infinity net" paintings: vast canvases covered in impastoed polka dots that seemed to stretch beyond the frame's edges. In 1962, she sold her first of these works to Frank Stella and Judd for $75. Fifty-two years later, one of her paintings sold at auction for $7.1 million, a record at the time for a living female artist. Yet during the 1960s and early 1970s, despite working within the spheres of pop art and minimalism, Kusama was largely excluded from the art world's recognition. She maintained throughout her life that many of her ideas from this period were appropriated by white male artists, including Andy Warhol, while she was written out of art history.

Her work was rooted in the concept of "self-obliteration"—the sensation of dissolving into infinity that her hallucinations produced. In 1963, she began making soft sculptures: furniture and objects like ladders covered with white, fabric-stuffed phallic forms. She described these as attempts to heal her disgust around sex, which she had been taught to view as dirty and shameful. Her performances and "happenings" throughout the 1960s were provocative and often controversial. In 1968, she staged New York's first homosexual wedding in Tribeca. She washed a Soviet flag outside the United Nations in protest of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. She wrote to President Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him if he would end the Vietnam War. Her conservative family back in Japan was appalled.

During her years in New York, Kusama was frequently hospitalized and developed an intense, platonic relationship with the outsider artist Joseph Cornell. When he died in 1972, her mental health deteriorated sharply. She experienced severe hallucinations, panic attacks, and suicide attempts. In 1977, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo that offered art therapy. She decided to stay there permanently, working each day from morning until night in a nearby studio. For more than a decade, interest in her work had nearly vanished. But in 1993, at the Venice Biennale, she presented a mirrored room filled with small pumpkin sculptures—a motif that had haunted her since childhood, when a pumpkin her grandfather showed her seemed to speak to her. The work was acclaimed, and recognition finally arrived.

Kusama's later installations built on her 1965 Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli's Field, in which hundreds of soft pink phallic forms were arranged within a mirrored chamber. These immersive experiences connected with global audiences in ways her earlier work had not. The colored lights and brightly painted pumpkins provided what curators and critics would later recognize as perfect social media content. Her 2024 exhibition in Australia became the most popular show in the country's history. Retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC drew crowds that sold out tickets weeks in advance. In 2017, a Hirshhorn exhibition was temporarily closed after a visitor damaged an artwork while attempting to take a selfie.

Kusama received numerous honors and her work commanded record prices, yet she remained skeptical of how history would judge her. "I cannot imagine how I will be classified after my death," she once said. "It feels good to be an outsider." Her company's statement noted that she continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and that her work explored "forever love and eternal soul." She had transformed a lifetime of suffering—childhood abuse, hallucinations, mental illness, decades of institutional living—into art that now fills the world's most prestigious museums and draws millions of visitors each year.