Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose seven-decade career encompassed painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature and film, has died at the age of 97. Kusama died at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, according to a statement from Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. Known internationally for her polka dots, pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama developed a distinctive artistic language around repetition, infinity, self-obliteration and the relationship between the individual and the world.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began making art at an early age, later studying traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto. She moved to New York in 1957, where she became part of the city's experimental art scene and began producing her Infinity Nets paintings. Covered with thousands of small, repeated marks, the works extended across the canvas with no obvious beginning or end. Repetition would remain a defining principle throughout her career, appearing in paintings, sculptures, objects, performances and installations.
Kusama gradually expanded her practice beyond the surface of the canvas. In 1965, she created Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field, placing hundreds of soft, phallic forms inside a mirrored environment. The reflections multiplied the objects and the viewer, transforming repetition into an immersive experience. She went on to create more than twenty distinct Infinity Mirror Rooms, using mirrors, lights, repeated objects, and enclosed spaces to produce environments that appear to stretch indefinitely. In these works, the visitor is not simply looking at an artwork but physically enters and becomes part of it.
What I think about first and foremost is that I want to create good art. That is my sole desire... I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death. There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart is bursting with the aspiration to make art that will last forever. - Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
Kusama's recurring motifs were often deeply personal. She has described experiencing hallucinations from childhood, including visions of patterns spreading across rooms and surfaces, and subsequently translated these experiences into her art. Pumpkins became another important motif, representing comfort and stability, while dots and repeated patterns offered a way of expressing her perception of an infinite universe. "I am just another dot in the world," Kusama once said, capturing the tension between individual identity and the vastness that has remained central to her work.
Kusama's work also entered architectural and landscape settings without becoming architecture in itself. In 2016, her Dots Obsession – Alive, Seeking for Eternal Hope temporarily covered Philip Johnson's Glass House with polka dots, visually transforming the relationship between the building and its landscape. Her Narcissus Garden, first presented independently at the 1966 Venice Biennale and later installed in numerous locations, used hundreds of mirrored spheres to alter perceptions of their surroundings.
Kusama's career was marked by both experimentation and periods of marginalization. After returning to Japan in 1973, she continued producing art while living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo from 1977 onward. Her work eventually received major international recognition, including her representation of Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale. She was awarded the Asahi Prize in 2001, the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2006, and the Order of Culture, one of Japan's highest cultural honors, in 2016. Though the opening of the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo in 2017 cemented her institutional legacy, for Kusama, art was always an eternal endeavor. "I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death," she once wrote, leaving behind a universe of dots, mirrors, and infinities that continue to invite viewers to lose themselves within it.
