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FILE – Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama, wearing a bright red wig and a Louis Vuitton polka dot scarf, speaks during an interview at her studio in Tokyo, on Aug. 1, 2012.<\/p>\n
Itsuo Inouye\/AP Photo\/Itsuo Inouye<\/p>\n
Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama works at her studio in Tokyo, Wednesday Aug 1, 2012.<\/p>\n
Itsuo Inouye\/AP Photo\/Itsuo Inouye<\/p>\n
FILE – Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama poses for photographers in front of her painting “Love Arrives at the Earth Carrying with it a Tale of the Cosmos” at the Tate Modern in London, on Feb. 7, 2012.<\/p>\n
Kirsty Wigglesworth\/AP Photo\/Kirsty Wigglesworth<\/p>\n
FILE – Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama waves in front of the windows of Vuitton’s flagship store for the unveiling of a new collaborative collection by Kusama and Vuitton creative designer Marc Jacobs in New York, on July 10, 2012.<\/p>\n
Kathy Willens\/AP Photo\/Kathy Willens<\/p>\n
TOKYO (AP) \u2014 Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who splashed her signature polka dots on paintings, sculptures and museum installations around the world, has died, her studio said Thursday. She was 97.<\/p>\n
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Kusama died Aug. 14 at a hospital in Tokyo, Yayoi Kusama Studio said, without specifying the cause of death.<\/p>\n
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\u201cShe continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul,\u201d the studio’s statement said. \u201cWe will carry forward Kusama\u2019s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kusama, one of Japan\u2019s most respected contemporary artists, was widely exhibited around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum Ludwig in Germany.<\/p>\n
Repetitive motifs were her trademark, in various shapes, resembling netting, swirls or worms, but most often dots, dancing proudly on her canvases, or as sparkling balls or dots of light in her installations, in all their vibrant psychedelic glory.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolka dots are fabulous,\u201d Kusama said in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press, appearing in her signature orange bob wig and polka dot attire.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw,\u201d she said in her childlike but matter-of-fact tone. \u201cI will keep painting until I die.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pursuing her vision of art over a lifetime<\/p>\n
Kusama insisted she drew the way she saw the world: covered with spots, part of the hallucinations she said she had from childhood. She was in and out of psychiatric institution for decades, although her sickness did not hold her back as she was one of the first Japanese women to go to New York to pursue her art, in 1957.<\/p>\n
Although soft-spoken and shy in her mannerisms, Kusama was always unabashedly bold in the assertion of her dotty vision, not only in sticking to the style for decades but also in making it accessible to the masses.<\/p>\n
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In her later years, as the times caught up with her art, she enjoyed fame. She signed on with fashion brands like Louis Vuitton as well as other licensed products like teacups, T-shirts and key chains with her illustrations, including replicas of her likeness that were used in show windows and other marketing.<\/p>\n
In 2008, Christie\u2019s auctioned her work for $5.8 million. In 2016, she won the most prestigious award Japan gives its artists, the Order of Culture.<\/p>\n
Upon receiving the award, she told reporters she was more determined than ever to pursue her art, stressing that the sincerity and devotion she had demonstrated in her personal life were crucial parts of her artistic legacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel there is little left in my life, but I am now still fighting to the death for my art,\u201d she said. \u201cI am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Categories were not enough to represent her art<\/p>\n
Kusama was called pop, avant-garde, feminist, just to name some of the categories thrown at her, most of which Kusama brushed off as not quite representative of her art.<\/p>\n
She was born in a middle-class family but felt misunderstood, as her parents wanted her to simply get married. They wanted to buy her kimono, not paints and brushes. She knew she had to get away. She chose America.<\/p>\n
When she arrived in New York, the fad was \u201caction painting,\u201d characterized by dribbles, swooshes and smears, not dots. She suffered years of poverty and obscurity. But she kept painting dots.<\/p>\n
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She put circles of paper on people\u2019s bodies, and once a horse, in \u201chappening\u201d anti-war performances in the late 1960s, which got some people arrested for obscenity but helped get media attention for her art. While in New York, she befriended artists like Andy Warhol, Georgia O\u2019Keeffe and Joseph Cornell, who praised her innovative style.<\/p>\n
Over the years, Kusama made quirky but stunningly celebratory works like \u201cMacaroni Girl,\u201d a female figure plastered with macaroni, which expresses the fear of food; \u201cThe Visionary Flowers,\u201d giant sculptures of twisting tulips, and \u201cMirrored Corridor,\u201d a room with mirrors that delivers an illusion of a field of phallic protrusions speckled with dots.<\/p>\n
Kusama, who has also made films and published several novels, said she wasn\u2019t sure where she got her ideas. She just picked up her brush and started drawing. The process was so mysterious sometimes she surprised herself, she told AP.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think, \u2018Oh, I drew that? I was thinking that,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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But she appeared happy to have her art be the focus of media attention and praise, reading one of her poems to a reporter or tackling her artworks with gusto for photos.<\/p>\n
But she was also a charmingly disarming mix of vulnerability and defiance, at one moment declaring herself \u201can artistic revolutionary,\u201d and then the next, mumbling: \u201cI am so afraid, all the time, of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fans around the world share messages of loss<\/p>\n
The news of her death was met with an outpouring of sadness from around the world, including museums that had exhibited her works.<\/p>\n
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Fans and artists alike praised her courageous persistence in vowing to continue creating art that, she said, will be recognized thousands of years after her death.<\/p>\n
Messages recognizing her death were sent from people throughout Japan including Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike and Yoshitomo Nara, a younger Japanese artist who has exhibited widely abroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cRIP Kusama-sensei,\u201d Nara wrote on his X account, respectfully calling her a teacher in Japanese.<\/p>\n
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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.<\/p>\n