Remembering the Epic Work of Yayoi Kusama, Who Died This Week at Age 97

Celebrating the Boundless World of Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026)

Few artists have ever reshaped the human perception of space, light, and obsession quite like Yayoi Kusama.

Passing away at 97, the iconic Japanese visionary spent nearly a century transforming private hallucinations into universal wonder, painting with relentless urgency until her final days.

Kusama’s universe began as an escape. As a child among the plant nurseries of Matsumoto, she experienced vivid, engulfing hallucinations where tablecloth patterns and field flowers seemed to swarm, speak, and swallow the room whole.

Rather than look away, she picked up a brush and translated that sensory deluge into a visual language: hypnotic, rhythmic polka dots that stretched toward infinity.

Renowned artist Yayoi Kusama has worked throughout her career in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, performance art and installations. Photo courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner.

When she landed in New York in 1958, Kusama threw that radical vision against the walls of the mid-century avant-garde.

She painted colossal Infinity Nets, pioneered soft-sculpture environments, and staged provocative, anti-war “happenings” that scandalized critics and quietly laid the groundwork for Pop Art and Minimalism.

Kusama’s work The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe, at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany in 2026. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images

By the late 1970s, seeking quiet sanctuary from lifelong mental health struggles, Kusama made the unconventional choice to move into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital. It became her home and launchpad for half a century.

Kusama’s work Narcissus Garden, which she presented at the Venice Biennale in 1966 without being invited. The work was eventually shut down by the biennale. Photograph: Yayoi Kusama

Every single morning, sporting her signature vivid red bob, she walked across the street to her studio to paint, sculpt, and build worlds from dawn to dusk.

Kusama next to her Dot Car (1965) in Scheveningen, the Netherlands. Photograph: Harrie Verstappen

What followed in her later years was one of the most mesmerizing second acts in art history. Long before the era of “immersive experiences,” Kusama had already cracked the code.

Her mirrored rooms, filled with glowing lanterns, speckled pumpkins, and endlessly multiplying reflections, weren’t designed for quick snapshots, they were contemplative chambers of what she called self-obliteration, places where the viewer’s ego gently dissolves into a boundless sea of light.

“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.”

Kusama never sought the art establishment’s approval, preferring the freedom of being an outsider.