Yayoi Kusama — The Artist Behind the Infinity Rooms, Dies at 97

Yayoi Kusama died grew up in Matsumoto, Japan, in a family that ran a plant nursery and seed farm. As a child she began seeing dots and nets, hallucinations she later called "self-obliteration," and she spent her life turning them into art. She trained briefly in traditional Japanese painting, then found the discipline too restrictive. In 1958, at 27, she moved to New York.

Yayoi Kusama with Narcissus Garden, 1966, installed in Venice Biennale, Italy, 1966 © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London/Venice

There she became a central figure in the city's avant-garde. She staged nude happenings in Central Park and at MoMA, painting polka dots directly onto her performers' bodies. Her soft sculptures, covered in phallic protrusions, predated similar work by male peers who received far more credit for it at the time, and critics have since pointed to the sexism that kept her from equal recognition. Her 1966 Venice Biennale piece Narcissus Garden, hundreds of mirrored spheres she sold on the lawn for two dollars each, remains one of the era's sharpest critiques of the art market.

"I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live."

She returned to Japan in 1973. In 1977, she checked into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she lived by choice for the rest of her life. Her studio sat a short walk away, and she worked there daily for decades. A wave of retrospectives in the late 1980s and 1990s brought her back into the spotlight. Her pumpkin sculptures, especially the yellow and black piece installed on Naoshima in 1994, became some of the most photographed artworks in the world.

Beyond visual art, she wrote novels, poetry, and an autobiography, and designed fashion lines and collaborations that carried her dots into stores worldwide. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms remain on view at museums worldwide. Her 1959 painting Untitled (Nets) sold for $10.5 million at auction in 2022.

Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 97. The news reached the public on August 26, through a statement from her gallery David Zwirner and the Yayoi Kusama Museum, which said she painted until her final days.

"I think I will be able to, in the end, rise above the clouds and climb the stairs to heaven, and I will look down on my beautiful life."