One of the most influential and celebrated artists to emerge from Japan has died. Yayoi Kusama passed away at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, at age 97, with her death announced on August 27.
Born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Nagano, Kusama began drawing from an early age, translating vivid childhood hallucinations, flashes of light and fields of dots, into imagery that would define her lifelong artistic language. She trained in the traditional Japanese nihonga painting style at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts before growing drawn to the European and American avant-garde.
In 1958, at 27, Kusama left Japan for the United States, settling first in Seattle before arriving in New York the following year. There she quickly established herself within the city’s avant-garde scene, developing her celebrated Infinity Nets paintings and pioneering body art performances and happenings. Her soft sculpture and installation work influenced contemporaries including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, and she formed close friendships and creative bonds with artists Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Cornell.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and, in 1977, took up residence at a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, continuing to work from a nearby studio for the rest of her life. She was open about the role art played in her wellbeing, saying that creating had allowed her to find a path forward. Her output during these decades was extraordinary in scope, spanning painting, sculpture, fashion, film, poetry and fiction, alongside a growing body of Infinity Mirror Room installations that became her most iconic works.
A revival of international interest through the late 1980s and 1990s brought retrospectives around the world, culminating in Japan’s celebrated presentation at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Her profile only grew from there. Major retrospectives followed at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, and a fifty-year survey at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 2017, the same year the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms became a global cultural phenomenon, drawing record crowds and social media attention at venues across six continents.
Kusama’s reach extended well beyond gallery walls. She collaborated with Marc Jacobs on a celebrated Louis Vuitton collection in 2012, designed work for Lancôme, and became known worldwide for her polka dot pumpkin sculptures, including the iconic piece permanently installed on Naoshima Island. In 2006, she became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of the nation’s highest honours for international artists, and she was later named a Person of Cultural Merit and recognized with Japan’s National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Order of the Rising Sun.
By the 2010s, Kusama had become widely regarded as the world’s most successful living artist, with record-breaking attendance at exhibitions from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong to Melbourne. Her work remains held in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.
Kusama’s art gave form to a lifetime of feeling, transforming personal struggle into some of the most immersive and beloved installations in contemporary art. Her polka dots and infinite reflections offered millions of visitors around the world a rare invitation into another artist’s inner universe, and that invitation will continue through the museums and mirror rooms that carry her name forward.
AloJapan.com