TOKYO — Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who splashed her signature polka dots on paintings, sculptures and museum installations around the world, has died, her company said Thursday. She was 97.
Kusama died Aug. 14 at a hospital in Tokyo, her company, Yayoi Kusama Studio, said in a statement.
Kusama, one of Japan’s most respected contemporary artists, was widely exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
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.
Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” 2013.
(EPW Studio / David Zwirner, New York)
In 2017, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the first U.S. museum survey of the 88-year-old Tokyo artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms at the Broad. The rooms generated “Hamilton”-scale hype.
Kusama told The Times: “I believe that people are attracted by the infinite mysterious beauty that the artwork has. I am also attracted.”
Now two of Kusama’s pieces on permanent display at the Broad draw, on any given day, a line of visitors to see the immersive art pieces for mere moments. “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” on the first floor, requires reservations to stand for one minute in a small mirrored room full of bouncing LED lights that make you feel like you’re floating in the Milky Way. “Longing for Eternity,” on the third floor, also draws lines but does not require a reservation to peek inside a chamber that gives off a purple disco dance floor vibe.
Both conjure a sense of awe, of boundless imagination. Millions have entered the “Souls” room, snapping photos and video that elicit floods of Instagram likes, since its opening in 2017.
Kusama, known for her fiery red wig, lived by choice in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital for decades. She had opened her own museum in Tokyo yet remained very private, granting limited interviews.
Kusama had hallucinations as a child that she channeled into drawings. She became a boundary-pushing artist on New York’s avant-garde scene int he 1960s, exhibiting with Andy Warhol, sculptor Claes Oldenburg and other greats. After having a breakdown in the late 1960s, she moved back to Japan permanently in 1973, where she focused on painting sculpture, novel-writing and collages.
Times staff writer Deborah Vankin contributed to this report.