For much of her life, Yayoi Kusama made art to stay alive. "If it were not for art," she once said, "I would have killed myself a long time ago."
On 27 August, the Yayoi Kusama Museum announced that the Japanese avant‑garde artist had died on 14 August from multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 97.
Across seven decades, the "Queen of Polka Dots" built an expansive body of work spanning painting, sculpture, installation, performance, fiction and poetry.
From the hallucinations that began in childhood, she made a universe of repeating forms: the pumpkins that became pop-culture icons, the Infinity Net canvases of her New York years, and the mirrored Infinity Rooms that captivated audiences in the age of social media.
Portrait (2015), 146 x 112.8 cm | Sold: HK$41,590,000, Sotheby's Hong Kong, 2024
Dots and Pumpkins
Kusama began experiencing hallucinations as a child. At ten, after staring at the red flower pattern on a tablecloth, she looked up to find it climbing the walls and ceiling, spreading across her body until the room seemed to disappear beneath it.
Those dense fields of dots and flashes of light would return without warning; flowers appeared where there were none, staircases seemed to dissolve underfoot. Unable to make the visions stop, she did the only thing that helped: painting what she saw. “Everything would be cured when I drew pictures,” she later said.
Against this unsettled inner world, Kusama found a lifelong companion in the pumpkin. She first encountered one while visiting a seed‑harvesting nursery with her grandfather. Among the yellow vines, she spotted a pumpkin the size of a man’s head. As she reached out to touch it, it began speaking to her.
Pumpkin (2000), 60 x 72 cm | Sold: HK$22,234,000, Bonhams Hong Kong, 2026
Yayoi Kusama officially represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993
River (1994), 33.3 x 24.2 cm | Sold: HK$2,193,000, Phillips Hong Kong, 2026
During the war and the lean years that followed, she ate pumpkin almost every day, to the point where the sight of it turned her stomach. Yet she continued to find solace in it, enchanted by what she described as its “generous unpretentiousness.”
“I adore pumpkins. As my spiritual home since childhood, and with their infinite spirituality, they contribute to the peace of mankind across the world and to the celebration of humanity. And by doing so they make me feel at peace,” she stated.
By seventeen or eighteen, she was already drawing pumpkins and submitting them to local exhibitions. Over the decades, they became some of her most recognisable images, appearing on paper and canvas, as monumental dotted sculptures, and in museums and public spaces around the world.
In 2023, Kusama's larger-than-life bronze Pumpkin (L) sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong for HK$62.63 million, setting an auction record for her sculpture.
The Yellow Pumpkin on Naoshima Island, Japan
Pumpkin (L) (2014), 241 x 235 x 235 cm | Sold: HK$62,638,000, Sotheby's Hong Kong, 2023 (Auction record for a sculpture by the artist)
Red Pumpkin (1989), 38 x 45.5 cm | Sold: HK$18,000,000, Poly Auction Hong Kong, 2024
Infinity Nets
Drawn to the promise of freedom and the energy of America’s postwar art scene, Kusama crossed the Pacific alone and moved to New York City in 1958.
She arrived with a suitcase full of drawings and a fierce determination to reshape the art world. But New York in the late 1950s was no easy place for a young Japanese woman with little English and few connections.
Money quickly ran out. She struggled with bills, immigration papers and illness, often with barely enough to eat. When things got worse, she scavenged fish heads from bins and vegetable scraps from the street; sometimes she ate the breadcrumbs left by pigeons.
On the hardest days, she would climb to the top of the Empire State Building and look out over the city, rehearsing the future she had come for.
Kusama began creating Infinity Nets paintings in New York
Untitled (Nets) (1959), 130.8 x 116.5 cm | Sold: US$10,496,000, Phillips New York, 2022 (Auction record for the artist)
Every dollar she earned went back into canvas and paint. In her studio, she set up enormous supports – so large she needed a ladder to reach the edges – and covered them with thousands of tiny, repeated arcs. She would paint for forty or fifty hours at a stretch, losing herself so completely in the repetition that she began to see the nets swallow the room.
Once, she carried an Infinity Net canvas taller than herself across forty blocks to submit it to the Whitney Museum of American Art, only to be rejected. But in 1959, at her first New York solo exhibition, the paintings found their audience. Critics recognised in them something radically new: neither the explosive gestures of Abstract Expressionism nor the cool restraint of Minimalism, but a bridge between the two.
“I was under the spell of the polka dot nets,” she said later. “Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse, bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot… I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.”
Today, Kusama's auction record belongs to a white Infinity Net painting from that same year, which sold for US$10.5 million at Phillips New York in 2022.
Kusama’s studio in New York
Infinity (completed in 1995), 193 x 129.5 cm | Sold: HK$46,434,000, Bonhams Hong Kong, 2024
Nets Obsession (2004), 162.3 x 162.3 cm | Sold: HK$25,660,000, Phillips and Poly Auction Hong Kong, 2021
Into the Infinite Room
Kusama had a breakthrough in 1965 when she made her first Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field. On the floor were several hundred red-and-white polka-dot soft sculptures in phallic shapes, reflected outward to infinity in the mirrors lining the walls. It was the culmination of her Aggregation series, in which she had spent years hand‑sewing the same forms obsessively across familiar objects.
“People often assume I must be mad about sex, because I make so many such objects, but that’s a complete misunderstanding,” she wrote. “It’s quite the opposite – I make the objects because they horrify me.”
Though born into wealth, Kusama’s childhood was marked by trauma. Her father was affectionate but unfaithful; her mother, strong-willed and controlling, opposed her artistic ambitions and often sent her to spy on his affairs. What she witnessed hardened into a lifelong anxiety and disgust around sex and the male body.
Kusama inside Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field
Pink Boat | Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Repetition (1998), 228 x 512 x 15 cm | Sold: HK$19,005,000, Phillips and Poly Auction Hong Kong, 2021
Reproducing phallic forms became a way of conquering that fear. Made soft, repeated and multiplied, the object of horror became something amusing – something she could lie among, allowing her to “revel in my illness in the dazzling light of day.”
Mirrors pushed the idea further, transforming a room full of identical forms into the illusion of an infinite universe. Kusama described this experience as “self-obliteration”, an idea that ran through her art. Through the obsessive repetition of a single motif – dots, nets, pumpkins, phallic forms – the boundary between self and world begins to dissolve.
The avant-garde artist would go on to make more than twenty such Infinity Mirror Rooms, each different in colour, material and scale. Their glowing lights and endless reflections have made them some of the most photographed works of contemporary art in the era of social media, with visitors often queuing for hours for only a few seconds inside.
An Infinity Mirror Room at Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, M+, Hong Kong
An Infinity Mirror Room at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Anti-War Happenings
As anti‑war sentiment grew in the late 1960s, Kusama carried her idea of self‑obliteration out of the mirror room and into the street. Having lived through the Second World War firsthand, she came to believe that art, which had helped her endure pain and trauma, could be the medium that connects humanity and the world.
Beginning in 1967, she staged a series of anti‑war Happenings she called Atomic Explosions, painting polka dots onto naked bodies and demonstrating in places such as Central Park, Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge. “Anatomic explosions are better than atomic explosions,” she announced in leaflets distributed on the street.
Kusama advocated for art as a form of peaceful activism
Kusama staged one of the Happenings on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1968
She declared herself the High Priestess of Polka Dots and founded a Church of Self‑Obliteration, where in 1968 she officiated at a wedding between two men. That same year, she wrote directly to President Nixon:
“Our earth is like one little polka dot, among millions of other celestial bodies, one orb full of hatred and strife amid the peaceful, silent spheres. Let’s you and I change all that and make this world a new Garden of Eden... You can’t eradicate violence by using more violence.”
Shinano Road (1983), 53.4 x 65.2 cm | Sold: HK$3,460,000, Christie's Hong Kong, 2018
A FLOWER (2014), 162.2 x 162.2 cm | Sold: HK$78,125,000, Christie's Hong Kong, 2023 (Auction record for the artist in Asia)
The End of the Universe
By the time she returned to Japan in 1973, Kusama was burned out. In 1977, she voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she has lived ever since.
From a studio a short walk away, she continued to work at a relentless pace, producing paintings, sculptures and installations while also writing poetry and fiction. A poem from 2007 reads almost like a final statement of purpose:
After the Battle, I Want to Die at the End of the Universe
I who have been shouting “Love Forever” to all the people.
Having always been distressed over how to live,
I have kept carrying the banner for pursuit of art.
And since the time I was born,
I have continued running.
On the world stage,
constantly shedding my yesterday's clothes for new ones,
I have kept creating an enormous body of work.
This “journey” of mine, under the midnight lamp and
in the stillness of many sleepless nights, has been a source of encouragement for me.
I want to shout love louder to the world and to leave my mark there.
To overcome conflicts, wars, terrors, and a morass of rich and poor in the world,
that is my earnest wish.
May people live in peace.
I never stop praying for that.
I want to keep fighting with the power of art.
With the pursuit of art as a cornerstone,
I want to serve the people and contribute to society.
I will eventually grow old,
walk up a ladder all the way up to heaven in the vast universe.
In a bed of quietly floating white clouds,
I depart from myself.
In a bed of deep and blue sky,
I will keep sleeping in comfort.
And I say farewell to the earth.