By Gabriela Afanador
Monday 31, August 2026
The world lost Yayoi Kusama on August 14th, 2026, at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 97 and, according to the statement her studio released days later, she had continued painting until the very end, never setting aside her brush. For anyone who knew even a little about who she was, that came as no surprise at all. Kusama and her work were never separate. They were the same thing, and they ended together.
She was born on March 22nd, 1929, in Matsumoto, a provincial city in Nagano Prefecture surrounded by the Japanese Alps, the youngest daughter of a family that ran a seed nursery. The landscape around her was full of flowers, violets and wildflowers that she began drawing as a small child, filling sketchbook after sketchbook with the natural world outside her window. But what she was seeing was never quite what everyone else saw. From early childhood, Kusama experienced hallucinations she would spend the rest of her life describing with remarkable precision, flashes of light, dense fields of dots, flowers that appeared to speak, animals that addressed her directly, and patterns that would expand and multiply until they swallowed everything in her field of vision. Drawing these visions was her first and most instinctive response to them. If she could get them onto paper, she could exist outside them rather than inside them, at least for a while. Her mother did not understand any of this and made little effort to, disapproving of her daughter’s art-making deeply, confiscating art supplies, directing her youngest daughter toward the conventional expectations of a girl of her background in postwar Japan. The opposition never worked. If anything, it sharpened the work’s necessity.
By the time she enrolled at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948 to study nihonga, traditional Japanese-style painting, she had already been exhibiting for years, and the work was accumulating faster than any external circumstance could slow it. She grew increasingly convinced that what she needed to make could not happen within the limits of where she was. Japan at the time was, in her own words, too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women.
The Letter That Changed Everything
The way Kusama found her path out of Japan is one of those biographical details that sounds almost too perfectly constructed, and yet it happened exactly as it is told. Browsing a secondhand bookstore in the mid-1950s, she came across a book of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and recognized immediately something she had been looking for, a woman who had built a completely singular visual language in a world that had very little tolerance for women who refused to be ordinary. She tracked down O’Keeffe’s address, wrote her a letter, and enclosed fourteen of her own watercolors, asking for guidance from someone who had already survived the version of the journey she was contemplating. O’Keeffe wrote back. The response was honest rather than warm, telling the younger artist plainly that making a living as an artist in America was genuinely difficult. But the act of writing back at all was the signal Kusama had been waiting for. In 1957, at the age of 28, she boarded a plane for the United States, stopping first in Seattle before arriving in New York in the late 1950s, in the middle of one of the most electrically creative moments in the city’s history.
New York and the Infinity Nets
Where the artists around her were moving toward big gesture and emotional expressionism, Kusama was moving in the opposite direction. Her Infinity Net paintings, enormous canvases covered entirely in thousands of small arching brushstrokes arranged in an obsessive repeating pattern, created a surface that stretched to all four edges without beginning or end, without hierarchy or focal point. They anticipated Minimalism and Op Art by years and did so from a place that had nothing to do with the intellectual frameworks those movements would build around themselves later. Kusama was not making a philosophical argument about the nature of the picture plane. She was painting what she actually saw during her episodes, the pattern that consumed her surroundings and expanded until it covered everything, translated onto canvas as an act of control and release simultaneously.
She was barely surviving financially during these years, barely eating, working in a cold studio with insufficient heat. The New York art world noticed the work without quite knowing how to situate it. She was included in exhibitions alongside Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and a young Andy Warhol, all on their way to the stardom that Pop Art would bring, working in territory that overlapped with all of them in ways that would only become historically visible much later. She has since said clearly, and the record supports her, that the soft sculptural accumulations Oldenburg became famous for appeared in her work before his, and that the seriality and dot imagery associated with Warhol were in conversation with ideas she had already developed. The art world did not credit her for any of this at the time.
The Body, the Dot, and the Happenings
By the 1960s Kusama had moved into even more radical territory, organizing public happenings in which participants were painted with polka dots, their naked bodies becoming extensions of the visual language she had been developing since childhood. In 1966, without an official invitation, she positioned herself outside the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale with 1,500 mirror balls and a sign offering them for two dollars each, a piece she titled Narcissus Garden that made the Biennale’s own commercial and vanity structures the subject of the work. The organizers asked her to leave. She kept going for as long as she could. In 1968, she sent an open letter to President Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him if he would end the Vietnam War. Let’s forget ourselves, dearest Richard, she wrote, and become one with the Absolute, all together in the alltogether. Nixon does not appear to have replied. The letter captures something essential about how Kusama understood the relationship between her inner life and the world around her. The dot, the net, the mirrored room, the painted body: all different expressions of the same idea. The self is not a fixed and bounded thing. It can expand, dissolve, and find itself again in everything around it.
The Return and the Studio Across the Street
By the early 1970s, the financial pressure, the chronic anxiety, and the accumulated weight of being consistently underacknowledged by the commercial art world she had helped to shape had worn Kusama down. She returned to Japan in 1973 and shortly after voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric institution in Tokyo, where she would live for the remaining five decades of her life. The decision was widely read as a retreat. It was not. She arranged to have a studio built directly across the street from the institution and walked there every day to work for the rest of her life. The clinic was where she managed the symptoms. The studio was where she actually lived. The art world largely forgot her through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, and then slowly found her again through a significant exhibition in 1989, the touring retrospective Love Forever between 1998 and 1999, and eventually a complete and accelerating rediscovery that transformed her from a significant but undervalued figure in the postwar avant-garde into one of the most attended and most commercially successful artists alive.
The Infinity Rooms and the World That Followed
The Infinity Mirror Rooms became the works that most fully communicated what Kusama had been trying to show from the beginning. Mirrored walls and ceiling and floor, light sources distributed throughout, the viewer placed at the center of reflections that appear to extend infinitely in every direction. The experience inside one is genuinely difficult to describe, the sense of the self dissolving into a luminous and endless universe made physically present in a way that required no art historical knowledge to feel. Queues stretched for hours at the Hirshhorn, the Tate Modern, the Whitney. Her 2012 retrospective at the Tate became one of the most attended in the museum’s history. In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo, with timed tickets selling out months in advance. Her giant yellow pumpkin on the island of Naoshima became one of the most photographed works of public art in the world. She collaborated with Louis Vuitton, designed Lancôme packaging, and set auction records for female artists with individual canvases selling for millions. None of this changed her daily routine. She walked from the institution across the street to the studio every morning and she painted, exactly the same way she had been painting since she was a child in Matsumoto.
What She Left Behind
What Kusama left behind is not simply a body of work, although the body of work is extraordinary by any measure, spanning painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature, fashion, and film across more than seven decades of uninterrupted production. What she left behind is something harder to quantify. She demonstrated, over an entire lifetime and against considerable resistance at every stage of it, that the interior life, however extreme and however difficult to manage, is a legitimate and inexhaustible source of art. That the act of making the interior visible, of placing the hallucination on the canvas rather than keeping it locked inside the head, is both a form of survival and a form of creation of the highest order. She did not make art despite her mental illness. She made it through it and with it, converting the terror of her hallucinations into surfaces of extraordinary beauty, and the dissolution of self she feared into an invitation extended to everyone who entered her rooms. The dot that had pursued her since childhood became the most recognized visual signature of one of the most significant artists of the century. She was still exploring it, her studio said, when she died. Still working toward forever love and eternal soul. There is no better description of what she spent 97 years doing.