Yayoi Kusama gained fame in recent years for her Instagramable "Infinity Rooms" — immersive installations using mirrors, lights and reflective surfaces to create the illusion of endless space — as well as her large-scale polka dot sculptures. While her works often appear playful, behind them lies the story of a woman who has faced major social and mental health challenges.
Around the age of 10, Yayoi Kusama began experiencing hallucinations, seeing dots and net patterns enveloping everything in her mind's eye. She attributed these early visions to the psychological strain of growing up with an unloving mother, who forbade her from painting and tried to impose traditional expectations on her behavior. Although she continued to experience hallucinations until late in life, Kusama learned to live with them and channel them into her art. "My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease," Kusama once told US arts publication Bomb Magazine.
After attending the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, Kusama held her first exhibitions in her hometown of Matsumoto. She was unusually open about her mental health at a time when such topics were heavily stigmatized.
"It was extraordinary that she addressed it so openly," said Stephan Diederich, curator of the Kusama retrospective at Cologne's Museum Ludwig which took place in 2026.
"For her, art was a survival strategy and a form of therapy, which she always made clear without making it the main focus," Diederich told DW.
Kusama's escape to New York
For Kusama, who was born on March 22, 1929, life in Japan soon became too stifling.
"[My parents] were always trying to rope me into arranged marriages with men I'd never met who came from very particular families," Yayoi once told writer Andrew Solomon, referring to her early 20s as "my era of mental breakdown." She increasingly felt like "a prisoner surrounded by a curtain of depersonalization."
Finally, she broke free from the conventions and expectations of postwar Japan and moved to New York in 1958. "She was exceptionally self-confident and determined to go her own way and pursue a career," said Diederich. Kusama's mother provided her with financial support to get started — on the condition that she never return to Japan. Fellow artist Georgia O'Keeffe, to whom Kusama had previously sent a selection of her works, helped her gain a foothold in the United States.
Kusama often spent entire days working and produced a vast body of art. She became part of the New York avant-garde scene, where her meticulous "Infinity Net" paintings drew attention for their hypnotic, repetitive patterns.
Her works, including soft, often phallic fabric sculptures, paralleled some of the approaches of contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
"She was very confident in saying that she set the benchmarks that her male colleagues later drew on," explained Diederich. However, he added, it's impossible to determine definitively who was first. In any case, her male fellow artists were more commercially successful than the young Asian woman, contributing to her attempted suicide, which she fortunately survived. Kusama made a statement about the gender pay gap with her sculpture "Traveling Life" (1964), which features a ladder covered in phallic shapes with women's shoes on the steps.
Phalluses are another recurring motif Kusama used to process her "fear of sex as something dirty," as she wrote in her 2022 autobiography. Returning to the universe through self-obliteration in the 1960s, Kusama held "happenings" as protests against the Vietnam War. They were often provocative, sometimes involving nudity and sexual activity, although Kusama often noted that she didn't personally participate in the sexual aspects of these events.
"Why should people who share pleasure with each other go to war and kill others? Through free sex, the wall between me and others can be torn down," Kusama wrote in her autobiography.
She was known for painting nude female and male bodies with dots, with the aim of erasing the individuality of those painted. She calls this "self-obliteration," and it runs through her entire body of work. "By obliterating one's self, you return to the infinite universe," Kusama once said.
In 1966, Kusama staged her work "Narcissus Garden" at the Venice Biennale. She placed 1,500 mirrored spheres on the lawn outside the entrance of the Venice Biennale, which she hadn't been invited to, and attempted to sell them for $2 each. Biennale officials eventually intervened and stopped the sale, but the work still served as a pointed critique of the commercialization of the art world and the role of artists in it.
Fame later in life
In 1993, Kusama returned to the Venice Biennale as an officially invited artist, representing Japan.
She later told the Financial Times that she wanted "to become more famous, even more famous," a remark that reflects how important recognition had become in her career and one that some commentators critiqued as overly focused on fame.
Over the past decade she reached a level of fame any artist would be envious of. In 2018, The Broad museum in Los Angeles quickly sold 90,000 advance tickets for a Kusama exhibition. A yearlong show at London's Tate Modern in 2022 sold out in no time, as did the one-year extension. Her artworks went on to fetch millions at auction.
Yayoi Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and chose to live in a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, where she received treatment for her mental health. She remained highly productive, creating paintings, sculptures, installations and other works that are exhibited around the world until her last days.
"I will continue to create artwork as long as my passion keeps me doing so. I am deeply moved that so many people have been my fans," she said in a previous interview. "I suppose I would not be able to know how people would evaluate my art until after I die. I create art for the healing of all mankind."
