Yayoi Kusama dies at 97; Tokyo hospital death kept private for 13 days

Yayoi Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August. The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation waited until Thursday to say so. The statement gave her age as 97 and did not list a cause. Kyodo News, citing people familiar with the matter, reported multiple organ failure. The museum said she painted until her last days and never put the brush aside.

She was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. She later described a childhood of family conflict and hallucinations of dots, flowers and flashing lights. Those visions became the working material of her art. In 2017 she told reporters she still saw them. Dots, she said, landed on her dress, the floor, objects she carried, the ceiling.

Kusama left Japan for New York in 1958. In the early 1960s she showed the large white-on-white and white-on-black canvases she called Infinity Nets, built from thousands of small hooked strokes. She staged Happenings in which she painted polka dots on naked participants. She made soft sculptures of repeated phallic forms and mirrored rooms that multiplied a single object into an apparent infinity. The work sat beside Pop and Minimalism without belonging cleanly to either camp.

In 1973 she returned to Japan. Four years later she admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she kept a studio nearby and lived for the rest of her life. For two decades the Western art market treated her as a footnote. That changed in the 1990s. She represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale with a mirrored pumpkin room. In 1994 Benesse installed a yellow fibreglass pumpkin on a pier at Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea. The sculpture was wrecked by a typhoon in August 2021 and replaced in October 2022 with a thicker shell and a stem fitting that lets crews drag it inland if another storm comes.

The Infinity Mirror Rooms did the commercial work that the early paintings never managed. Museums sold timed tickets. Visitors queued for two minutes inside a dark chamber of LEDs and mirrors, then posted the photographs. Auction houses sold pumpkin sculptures and dotted canvases for tens of millions of dollars. By her late eighties Kusama was one of the world's most exhibited living artists. She received Japan's Order of Culture in 2016. She wore a red wig in public and spoke about death and love in the same sentence.

The museum statement on Thursday stayed inside that register. It said she spent a lifetime on visual art, performance, fiction and poetry, and that the studio would carry her wishes forward. It did not announce a funeral. It did not name an heir to the studio practice. The hospital date, 14 August, means the institution held the news for 13 days. That delay is unusual for an artist whose every exhibition opening is a press event. It is consistent with a life organised around a hospital ward and a painting room rather than a publicity calendar.

What she leaves is a brand and a method. The brand is dots, pumpkins and mirrored rooms. The method is repetition as a way to stay ahead of a hallucination. Younger artists who use immersive rooms now work in a format she made expensive and popular. Museums that built Kusama wings will keep those rooms running because the tickets pay for other shows. The paintings she finished in the last weeks will enter the catalogue when the studio is ready to date them.

Matsumoto already keeps a Kusama museum in her home city. Tokyo's Yayoi Kusama Museum in Shinjuku has run tightly controlled exhibitions of the late work. Naoshima's two pumpkins, yellow on the pier and red at the ferry, will remain the public sculptures most people see without buying a ticket. None of those sites said on Thursday whether they would alter hours or hang black cloth. The work is already installed. The artist who made it is not.

Kusama's own account of her childhood was that she wanted to die every day. She turned that pressure into a practice that lasted into her late nineties. The last fact the studio offered is the one that fits the work: she kept painting after the body had begun to fail. The dots did not stop when the hospital admitted her in 1977. They did not stop in August 2026 either, until the organs did.