Yayoi Kusama, who turned hallucinations into polka dots and infinity rooms, dies at 97

Yayoi Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August. She was 97. The Yayoi Kusama Museum and her foundation announced the death on 27 August and named multiple organ failure as the cause. The statement said she continued to paint until the final days and never set the brush aside.

David Zwirner, who represented her for 15 years, called her the most famous living artist in the world at the time of her death. That claim is a dealer's line, but the attendance figures behind it are real. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms drew hour-long queues in New York, London, Melbourne and Tokyo. Untitled (Nets) from 1959 sold for $10.5 million in 2022. Many later works cleared $1 million at auction.

She was born in 1929 in Matsumoto. Family conflict and hallucinations started in childhood. Dots, she later said, landed on her dress, the floor, the ceiling and the things she carried. She painted them to hold the fear down. "By continually reproducing the forms of things that terrify me, I am able to suppress the fear," she told interviewers.

New York, then the hospital

Kusama reached New York in the late 1950s. The first works that held attention were the Infinity Nets, large canvases covered in small loops. She then made phallic soft sculptures, mirrored rooms and public performances that put painted dots on bodies in the street. Those actions sat inside the 1960s avant-garde and also apart from it. She was a woman from Japan working in a scene that rarely made room for either fact.

Commercial success did not follow at the same speed as notoriety. She returned to Japan and, in 1977, admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She kept a studio nearby and worked from that arrangement for the rest of her life. The hospital stay was voluntary and long. It became part of the public story of the work rather than a secret beside it.

The late career is the one most visitors now know. Pumpkins covered in dots. Rooms lined with mirrors and hanging lights. The Obliteration Room, in which the public sticks dots onto white furniture until the space disappears. Those installations travelled as exhibitions and as products. Louis Vuitton collaborations and museum gift-shop pumpkins sat next to the hospital studio.

What the rooms actually do

The Infinity Rooms are easy to reduce to a photograph. That is how most people meet them. Stand inside one and the effect is simpler and colder than the social-media crop. Repeated lights or pumpkins run to a false horizon. The body of the viewer becomes one more object in the field. Kusama described that field as a way to dissolve the self. Museums described it as an experience product. Both descriptions are accurate and they pull in different directions.

She also wrote fiction and poetry. The company statement listed those forms beside painting and performance. The novels are less visited than the rooms. They sit in the same register: repetition, sex, fear, a wish to disappear into pattern.

Japan treated her as a national figure late. Shinzo Abe received her in 2013. A museum under her name opened in Tokyo in 2017. The red wig and the dotted clothes became a fixed public image, as designed as the rooms.

After 14 August

No public funeral details were released with the first statement. The museum said it would carry her wishes forward through art. That is institutional language. The practical questions are the collection, the studio archive and how the Infinity Rooms will be shown once the artist who approved their construction is gone.

Kusama outlived the peers who ignored her in the 1960s and the market that later priced her above most of them. The dots did the work she assigned them. They covered the fear and then covered the museums. The hospital room and the mirrored room were two versions of the same method. She used both until the second week of August.