From the 1950s to the 2020s, Kusama produced vivid paintings, sculptures and vast installations that often drew on her experience of hallucinations
Was Kusama the world’s favourite artist?
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese outsider artist who reached superstar status after decades living in a psychiatric hospital, has died aged 97.
Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August, her company Yayoi Kusama Inc announced in a statement on Thursday.
“Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry,” the statement read. “She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul.”
“We will carry forward Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world.”
Instantly recognisable by her bright red bobbed wig, Kusama became known for her psychedelic colour schemes and “infinity mirror room” installations, which helped her find a huge audience in the age of the social media selfie: her 2024 show in Australia was the most popular exhibition in the country’s history. Yet she had pioneered many of her enduring themes as a young artist in the 1960s, before fading into temporary obscurity.
As well as being a sculptor and painter, Kusama put on numerous performance pieces throughout the hippy era that saw her name attached to scandal. She staged “body festivals” with naked performers painted in polka dots and once wrote to US president Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in return for an end to the Vietnam war. News of such events appalled her conservative family back home.
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, enduring an unhappy childhood at the hands of an abusive mother and philandering father. Her wealthy family managed plant nurseries and Kusama would sit and draw the flowers despite her mother’s frequent attempts to stop her. As a child, Kusama began experiencing hallucinations, in which the flowers would swarm around and talk to her. Her coping mechanism was to draw what she saw.
During the second world war, 13-year-old Kusama was conscripted to produce fabric for Japanese army parachutes. She later studied nihonga, a traditional Japanese style of painting, in Kyoto, but grew frustrated with its limitations. Rejecting her planned future of an arranged marriage and children, Kusama left Japan for New York in 1958. There, she fell in with the artist and theorist Donald Judd and made a breakthrough with her “infinity net” paintings – vast fields of impastoed polka dots that stretched across the canvas. In 1962, she sold her first of these to the artists Frank Stella and Judd for $75. In 2014, her White No 28 sold for $7.1m (£5.7m) at auction, a record at the time for a living female artist.
In 1963, Kusama started making “soft sculptures” – pieces of furniture and other objects, such as ladders, covered with white, fabric-stuffed phallic shapes. They were, she said, her attempt to heal her disgust around sex, which she had been brought up to believe was dirty and shameful.
Despite working loosely within the spheres of pop art and minimalism, Kusama was not embraced by the art world. She always maintained 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.
Kusama’s work was often centred around the infinite and the idea of “self-obliteration”, a concept inspired by the hallucinations that would engulf her. Talking about her 1954 painting Flower (DSPS), she once said: “I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. 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.”
At the 1966 Venice Biennale she continued these studies, presenting her infamous Narcissus Garden, a “lake” of 1,500 reflective balls that strived for a sense of mirrored infinity. When Kusama began selling the balls for $2 each under the banner “Your narcissism for sale”, the biennale moved to close the operation down.
Kusama developed a flair for controversy. Her artistic “happenings” were often criticised for being mere shock material, yet their political statements now seem ahead of their time. In 1968, she staged New York’s first “homosexual wedding” in Tribeca and washed a “dirty” Soviet flag outside the United Nations building in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
