![\"Yayoi](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ec54.jpg\")
Yayoi Kusama in her iconic red-and-white polka-dot dress before a wall in the same pattern. Tokyo, Japan, 8 August 2013. – shutterstock<\/p>\n
The Japanese artist, who had suffered from depression and hallucinations since childhood and, for the past several decades, had voluntarily lived in a psychiatric clinic, was 97. According to a report by the Kyodo news agency, the cause of death was multiple organ failure. Kusama also became an icon of hypnotic art through her whimsical pumpkin sculptures.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A difficult childhood shaped the artist<\/p>\n
Born in 1929, the artist grew up in a strict, authoritarian household in the small city of Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture and endured a difficult childhood. As a young girl, she suffered greatly under her domineering mother who, according to Kusama\u2019s own account, made her spy on her father during his extramarital affairs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
These experiences are believed to have instilled in Kusama a fear of sexuality, which she later worked through in her art. Her mother\u2019s severity, which impeded her natural emotional development, may have contributed to an illness that began early and manifested as hallucinations.<\/p>\n
Early successes in New York<\/p>\n
The Japanese artist began seeing patterns of dots and nets and feared she would dissolve into them. Over the course of her long life, she attempted suicide several times. After attending an art college in the former imperial capital of Kyoto and staging her first exhibitions, Kusama decided to flee to the United States to escape her mother\u2019s pressure. Between 1958 and 1972, she lived and worked mainly in New York.<\/p>\n
During this period she produced many of her best-known artworks, installations and happenings. \u201cIn the era of the sexual revolution, she managed to become more famous than Andy Warhol in the New York art scene through her politically motivated performances,\u201d Mario Ambrosius, a well-known German artist living in Japan, told the German Press Agency in Tokyo. Kusama achieved her first major success in New York in 1959 with the exhibition \u201cObsessional Monochrome.\u201d Her \u201cInfinity Net\u201d paintings featured web-like compositions of white lines on a black background.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolka Dots\u201d as a quest for infinity<\/p>\n
Above all, dots- which had their origin in her hallucinations- became the artist\u2019s signature. She constantly perceived patterns of dots and nets and feared dissolving into them. The \u201cPolka Dots\u201d became an expression of her quest for infinity and self-dissolution. In rooms known as \u201cInfinity Mirror Rooms<\/a>,\u201d Kusama used her dots, along with spheres, other objects, mirrors and light, to offer spectacular glimpses of an imagined infinity.<\/p>\n During her happenings in New York, her \u201cPolka Dots\u201d were also painted onto a great deal of bare skin. She staged herself as an artist both through and within her work. Kusama gained international fame in 1966 with the happening \u201cNarcissus Garden.\u201d Because her works had not been selected for the Venice Biennale, she installed 1,500 mirrored spheres outside the exhibition hall without permission.<\/p>\n In the late 1960s, Kusama drew on ideas from the hippie movement, such as pacifism and nudism. Among her works, Ambrosius highlights \u201cAggregation: One Thousand Boats Show\u201d from 1963 at the Gertrude Stein Gallery and \u201cPhalli\u2019s Field\u201d from 1965 at New York\u2019s Castellane Gallery. However, commercial success failed to materialise, and in 1973 she returned to Japan. In 1977, Kusama had herself admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo\u2019s Shinjuku district, where she lived and worked as an artist until the end of her life.<\/p>\n Breakthrough as an international artist<\/p>\n \u201cShe was now able to concentrate fully on writing books, gradually hinting at an attempt to make a fresh start as an artist,\u201d says Ambrosius. Kusama went on to become an exceptionally successful artist, celebrated internationally. In Japan, countless souvenirs and fan merchandise featuring her motifs are sold, whilst huge Kusama statues stand in Paris and elsewhere. Her pumpkins, including those on the Japanese island of Naoshima, have achieved cult status and are major tourist attractions. In 2012, the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton<\/a> invited her to design the shop windows of its stores, including those in New York and Tokyo.<\/p>\n For Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the recently concluded retrospective of the artist\u2019s work was its most successful exhibition to date, attracting more than 450,000 visitors. The exhibition ended in early August. The show featured 300 works, ranging from early childhood drawings to the present day. The most spectacular element was a vast room entirely traversed by polka-dotted octopus tentacles, through which visitors could wander.<\/p>\n \u201cAs an artist, she has reached the same level as the late Louise Bourgeois,\u201d says Ambrosius, who, by his own account, was the first, in 1993, to portray Kusama as a serious artist- in words and pictures- in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, in her \u201ctiny, garage-like studio.\u201d<\/p>\n In many of her works, Kusama herself appears- for example, in photographs- dressed in the same patterns that feature in her art. Through this camouflage, she seemingly merges visually with her work. At a retrospective at Berlin\u2019s Gropius-Bau in 2021, a spokeswoman conveyed the artist\u2019s message: \u201cTo race through time until death and then live on eternally in beautiful love for the glory of humanity: that is the highest goal of my art.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By DPA Published August 27, 2026 Yayoi Kusama, arguably Japan\u2019s most renowned and successful contemporary artist, has died.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9066,1908,8,17,12331,4007,925,51993,33532,51755],"class_list":["post-81182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-beauty","tag-fashion","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-louis-vuitton","tag-luxury","tag-network","tag-professionals","tag-rooms","tag-yayoi-kusama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/82f7.jpg\")
The Japanese artist\u2019s iconic pumpkins on display at an exhibition in Bangkok. Bangkok, Thailand, 1 April 2023. – shutterstock<\/p>\n