TOKYO, Japan — Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who turned polka dots, mirrored spaces and pumpkins into globally recognised images, has died. She was 97.
Kusama died at a Tokyo hospital on August 14, her studio announced on Thursday, August 27, 2026. A cause of death was not disclosed.
“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush,” Yayoi Kusama Studio said in a statement reported by the Associated Press.
The studio said it would preserve Kusama’s artistic vision and continue using her work to offer “hope and strength for the future” to people around the world.
A Visual Language Built on Repetition
Across a career spanning more than seven decades, Kusama worked in painting, sculpture, performance, film, fiction, and immersive installation.
Repeated patterns appeared throughout those forms: fields of dots, dense nets, mirrored spheres, curling shapes and illuminated rooms seemingly extending without limit.
Her Infinity Mirror Rooms became some of the most widely attended museum installations of contemporary art.
Visitors entered enclosed spaces where mirrors, lights and suspended objects created the impression of an endless environment.
Kusama said her imagery arose partly from hallucinations she had experienced since childhood.
She described seeing dots, flowers and patterns spreading across her surroundings and used repetition in her work to give visual form to those experiences.
“Polka dots are fabulous,” she told the Associated Press in 2012.
Her recurring pumpkin sculptures, often painted yellow with black spots, also became closely associated with her work.
Other prominent pieces included Narcissus Garden, an installation of reflective spheres first presented in 1966, and large flower sculptures displayed in public spaces and museums.
Her exhibitions appeared at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and museums across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
From Matsumoto to New York
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a city in central Japan.
She began drawing as a child but faced opposition from her family, who expected her to marry rather than pursue art professionally.
After studying traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto, she left Japan for the United States in 1957 and later settled in New York.
The city’s art world was then dominated by abstract expressionism and the physical gestures of painters who poured, dripped and swept paint across canvases.
Kusama followed a different course, covering large surfaces with tightly repeated marks that she called Infinity Nets.
She experienced financial hardship and limited recognition during her early years in America but continued exhibiting and participating in New York’s developing avant-garde movement.
Kusama staged public “happenings” during the 1960s, sometimes covering performers with painted or paper circles.
Some of the events protested the Vietnam War, while others explored sexuality, identity and what she called “self-obliteration”.
She formed associations with artists including Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Cornell.
Her work was later grouped with pop art, minimalism, feminist art and surrealism, although Kusama resisted attempts to confine it to a single movement.
International Recognition Arrived Later
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. In 1977, she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and continued living there while working from a nearby studio.
She also wrote poetry and fiction, publishing several novels alongside her visual art.
International attention grew substantially in the later decades of her life.
Major museum retrospectives introduced her work to new audiences, while her mirrored installations became particularly popular with younger visitors.
Her distinctive designs also appeared on clothing, accessories and other commercial products through collaborations with companies including Louis Vuitton.
Large reproductions of her likeness and polka-dotted sculptures were displayed outside shops and in public spaces.
Kusama’s paintings sold for millions of dollars at international auctions.
In 2016, Japan awarded her the Order of Culture, the country’s highest honour for artists and other cultural figures. The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo the following year.
Despite her growing commercial profile, Kusama continued to describe painting as the centre of her life.
“I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw,” she said in 2012. “I will keep painting until I die.”
After receiving the Order of Culture, she said the award had strengthened her determination to continue working.
“I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead,” Kusama said.
Her studio said that commitment remained unchanged during her final days.
