Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (born March 22, 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is a Japanese artist who is a self-described “obsessional artist,” known for her extensive use of polka dots and for her infinity installations. She employed painting, sculpture, performance art, and installations in a variety of styles, including Pop art and Minimalism.

By her own account, Kusama began painting as a child, at about the time she began experiencing hallucinations that often involved fields of dots. Those hallucinations and the theme of dots would continue to inform her art throughout her career. She had little formal training, studying art only briefly (1948–49) at the Kyōto City Specialist School of Arts. Family conflict and the desire to become an artist drove her to move in 1957 to the United States, where she settled in New York City. Before leaving Japan, she destroyed many of her early paintings.

Her early work in New York City included what she called “infinity net” paintings. Those consisted of thousands of tiny marks obsessively repeated across large canvases without regard for the edges of the canvas, as if they continued into infinity. Such works explored the physical and psychological boundaries of painting, with the seemingly endless repetition of the marks creating an almost hypnotic sensation for both the viewer and the artist. Her paintings from that period anticipated the emerging Minimalist movement, but her work soon transitioned to Pop art and performance art. She became a central figure in the New York avant-garde, and her work was exhibited alongside that of such artists as Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol.

Obsessive repetition continued to be a theme in Kusama’s sculpture and installation art, which she began to exhibit in the early 1960s. The theme of sexual anxiety linked much of that work, in which Kusama covered the surface of objects, such as an armchair in Accumulation No. 1 (1962), with small soft phallic sculptures constructed from white fabric. Installations from that time included Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (1965), a mirrored room whose floors were covered with hundreds of stuffed phalli that had been painted with red dots. Mirrors gave her the opportunity to create infinite planes in her installations, and she would continue to use them in later pieces.

Mirroring the times, Kusama’s performance art explored antiwar, antiestablishment, and free-love ideas. Those Happenings often involved public nudity, with the stated intention of disassembling boundaries of identity, sexuality, and the body. In Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead (1969), Kusama painted dots on participants’ naked bodies in an unauthorized performance in the fountain of the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Critics accused her of intense self-promotion, and her work was regularly covered in the press; Grand Orgy appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News.

Kusama moved back to Japan in 1973. From 1977, by her own choice, she lived in a mental hospital. She continued to produce art during that period and also wrote surreal poetry and fiction, including The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street (1984) and Between Heaven and Earth (1988). Kusama returned to the international art world in 1989 with shows in New York City and Oxford, England. In 1993 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with work that included Mirror Room (Pumpkin), an installation in which she filled a mirrored room with pumpkin sculptures covered in her signature dots. Between 1998 and 1999 a major retrospective of her works was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

In 2006 Kusama received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting. Her work was the subject of major retrospectives throughout the 21st century, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2012), New York City; in a traveling exhibition that included the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2017), Washington, D.C., which attracted record crowds; and at M+ (2022), Hong Kong. The Hirshhorn show featured a sample of Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Rooms, installations usually comprising a mirrored room with hundreds of coloured lights, and the works soon became some of her most popular pieces. In 2017 she opened a museum dedicated to her work in Tokyo, near her studio and the psychiatric hospital where she lived.