Yayoi Kusama: The Woman Who Turned Hallucinations Into Infinity
At 97, the Japanese artist leaves behind a body of work that transformed dots, repetition, and infinity into a language recognized around the world
Yayoi Kusama spent decades transforming what could have been perceived as a limitation into raw material for creation. Her dots, infinite nets, pumpkins, and mirrored rooms were never simply elements of an immediately recognizable aesthetic. They were part of a language built from obsessions, memories, hallucinations, and an almost vital need to create.
The Japanese artist died at 97 on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo. Her death was officially announced on Thursday, August 27, on her website. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Her passing closes one of the most singular careers in contemporary art — but perhaps hers is precisely the kind of journey that cannot be defined by a date.
Before the Dots, There Were the Visions
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama grew up in a family marked by conflict and abuse. As a child, she began experiencing hallucinations that altered her perception of the world. Patterns, dots, and repetitive forms began to occupy her field of vision.
That experience would eventually become one of the most powerful visual signatures in contemporary art.
During World War II, she spent part of her childhood working in a military factory, sewing parachutes for Japan’s Imperial Army. Later, she studied traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto, but she never showed much interest in remaining within the conventions of Japanese art. Her gaze was directed elsewhere.
Kusama found in nets and dots a way to visually translate what she experienced internally. Her Infinity Nets, begun in the 1950s, already anticipated an obsession that would run throughout her career: repetition as a pathway toward infinity.
New York and the Break With Convention
At 27, in 1957, Kusama left Japan for the United States. She first arrived in Seattle before moving to New York, just as the city was becoming one of the world’s major centers of avant-garde art.
There, she encountered an art scene dominated by men and shaped by Abstract Expressionism. Rather than trying to adapt to that world, Kusama did the opposite: she built a radical language of her own.
Her paintings covered in nets and dots, sculptures, objects, and installations challenged traditional ideas of painting. She also experimented with film, literature, performance, and happenings.
During the 1960s, her performances brought art, the body, and activism together. In some of them, naked bodies were painted with dots, turning skin into an extension of her work. Kusama also publicly opposed the Vietnam War and addressed issues surrounding sexual freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender equality.
In 1968, she famously wrote an open letter to then-U.S. President Richard Nixon, making a provocation as absurd as it was politically calculated: she offered him sex if he would help end the Vietnam War.
The proposal was, unsurprisingly, never accepted. But the message said much about Kusama: her work could be colorful, playful, and seemingly pop, yet it was never apolitical.
Infinity as a Language
Perhaps no part of her practice translated her vision more clearly than the Infinity Mirror Rooms.
In these installations, mirrors, lights, and repeated forms create environments in which viewers lose their sense of where the space ends. A limited number of elements appear to multiply endlessly.
The result is both hypnotic and unsettling.
Millions of people experienced her installations around the world, transforming an artist who had spent decades on the margins of the art establishment into one of contemporary art’s most popular and commercially successful figures. Her works generated millions of dollars at auction, while her pumpkins and polka dots became instantly recognizable even among people who do not regularly engage with the art world.
The scale of her influence can also be measured by exhibition attendance. A major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, held between 2024 and 2025, attracted more than 570,000 visitors — a record for the institution.
The Artist Who Never Stopped Creating
Kusama’s story is also inseparable from her relationship with mental health. After returning to Japan in 1973, she voluntarily began living at a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1977, while maintaining a nearby studio where she continued to work.
For her, creation was never simply a profession.
It was a way of remaining in the world.
Despite decades of relative obscurity and profound personal difficulties, Kusama continued to produce. Her career crossed painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature, and poetry. And even in old age, her creative output did not disappear.
Her official website stated that she continued painting until her final days, never abandoning the brush.
It is a particularly powerful image with which to remember her: at 97, still standing before the canvas.
From Outsider to Global Icon
There is an inherent irony in Kusama’s story. For much of her life, she existed outside the traditional centers of artistic power. She was a Japanese woman working in a predominantly male American art scene. Her practice moved between categories that the market and critics did not always know how to classify.
Today, it is difficult to imagine contemporary art without her presence.
Kusama became a reference not only for museums and galleries, but also for fashion, popular culture, and design. Her visual universe moved beyond institutional walls and reached millions of people who might otherwise never have encountered contemporary art.
In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo, institutionally consolidating a legacy that had already conquered the world.
A Life Transformed Into Language
Kusama never completely concealed the contradictions of her journey. In many ways, they appear to sit at the very center of her work.
Obsession became repetition.Repetition became pattern.Pattern became identity.And identity became a universe.
Her dots may look simple. Her pumpkins may appear playful. Her mirrors may seem designed purely to create wonder. But beneath all of it lies something profoundly human: the attempt to give form to what cannot easily be explained.
Perhaps that is why her work transcended generations.
Yayoi Kusama did not simply create an aesthetic. She created a vocabulary for speaking about infinity, loneliness, existence, the body, memory, and belonging.
And she did it through repetition.
One dot.
Then another.
And another.
Until it became impossible to distinguish where the artist ended and the universe she created began.
At 97, Kusama is gone.
But infinity, as she taught us, does not end.
It simply keeps repeating.
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