Yayoi Kusama

Biography

In 1966, at the 33rd Venice Biennale, fifteen hundred silvery plastic balls appeared on the lawn by the Italian pavilion. This was Yayoi Kusama’s “Narcissus Garden”, a “kinetic carpet”, as she called it. The artist herself, in a gold kimono, stood beside it selling the balls one at a time until the organisers stopped her trading. It was self-promotion and at the same time a jibe at the way art turns into a commodity.

She was thirty-seven and in her eighth year in New York.

Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, into a merchant family that ran a plant nursery and seed business. Pumpkins, her great motif to come, she was already drawing at primary school, and she remembered a trip with her grandfather to a large seed field where they grew. Her mother disapproved of her drawing and took the sheets away from her. At about ten the visions began: flashes of light, auras, dense fields of dots, flowers that spoke to her. The best known of them she later described like this: the red flowers on a tablecloth crept onto the ceiling, the windows, the walls and her own body, and she felt she was dissolving. She called this feeling “self-obliteration” and made it the theme of her whole life. Her earliest work with dots, a drawing of 1939, shows a woman in a kimono (apparently her mother) almost hidden under spots. At thirteen, during the war, she was sent to sew parachutes in a military factory. In 1948 she spent a year at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts studying the traditional painting style nihonga, but it irritated her, and in the 1950s she was holding exhibitions of abstract work in Matsumoto and Tokyo.

Before leaving for America Kusama destroyed many of her early works. She corresponded with Georgia O’Keeffe and asked her advice. In 1957 there was an exhibition in Seattle, in 1958 the move to New York. Here the “Infinity Nets” appeared, huge canvases, some more than nine metres long, covered from edge to edge in loops and dots. Her first real success came with an exhibition at the Brata Gallery in 1959; Donald Judd wrote well of it. From 1961 her studio was in the same building as Judd’s and Eva Hesse’s. The soft sculptures began at the same time: stepladders, shoes, chairs, and in “Accumulation No. 2” (1962) an entire sofa, all covered in white fabric protrusions, absurd and menacing. In June 1963 such a sofa was shown at the Green Gallery next to a work by Claes Oldenburg, who was not yet sewing soft sculptures; by September they had turned up in his work too. Something similar happened with Warhol: Kusama showed a boat covered in soft protrusions in a room papered with photographs of it, and soon afterwards Warhol papered a room with cow wallpaper. After that she began to keep quiet about what she was working on.

From 1963 came the mirror rooms. Inside a mirrored box, polka dots, glowing balls or protrusions reflect one another without end, and the viewer stands in the middle of a space that has no walls. From 1966 light and music joined the mirrors. In the late 1960s Kusama staged happenings in Central Park and on the Brooklyn Bridge against the Vietnam War, painting polka dots on naked participants. In 1969, in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, eight of her performers undressed without warning, stepped into the fountain and froze, copying the poses of the sculptures by Picasso, Giacometti and Maillol that stood there; the action was called “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead”. In Japan these scandals were not forgiven, and the school where she had studied struck her name from its list of graduates. Art brought her almost no money.

In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan, where she was received coldly. In 1977 she found a doctor who treated patients through art and, of her own accord, moved into the Seiwa psychiatric hospital in Shinjuku, Tokyo. She lived there for the rest of her life and worked in a studio a few minutes’ walk away. She never hid her illness and said that art was her only way of coping with it. In these years she also wrote a great deal: a collection of poems and pictures, “7” (1977), novels from 1978, and in 2003 an autobiography, “Infinity Net”.

The revival of interest in her began with a 1989 retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York. In 1993 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with a mirror room filled with small pumpkins. In 1994 her large yellow pumpkin with black dots, two and a half metres across, was placed on a pier on the island of Naoshima; in 2021 a typhoon washed it away, and in 2022 it was installed again. Kusama called the pumpkin something like a self-portrait. In the room “I’m Here, but Nothing” (2000–2008) ordinary furniture, crockery and rugs are scattered with fluorescent dots that glow under ultraviolet light, and the room itself seems to disappear. It seems to me that here you can see how the childhood vision of the tablecloth became, sixty years later, a space you can walk into.

Then came the Asahi Prize (2001), the French Order of Arts and Letters (2003) and the Praemium Imperiale (2006), and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (1998) and at the Whitney Museum and Tate Modern (2012). A fifty-year retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 2017, with six mirror rooms, travelled to five museums in the United States and Canada. The same year the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo. The largest retrospective in Asia outside Japan was shown by the M+ museum in Hong Kong in 2022–2023.

Kusama died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026, at the age of 97; her death was announced on 27 August. Her retrospective, which began at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen and continued at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, opened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on 11 September 2026.