lit a candle 2 Sept 2026There are people you assume will always be there. Losing Yayoi feels like losing a piece of the furniture of the world.
Their story
Yayoi Kusama, born on 22 March 1929 and died on 14 August 2026, was a Japanese contemporary artist whose name became inseparable from the polka dot. Sculpture and installation were her main languages, but she moved freely between painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry and fiction. Her practice was rooted…
Yayoi Kusama, born on 22 March 1929 and died on 14 August 2026, was a Japanese contemporary artist whose name became inseparable from the polka dot. Sculpture and installation were her main languages, but she moved freely between painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry and fiction. Her practice was rooted in conceptual art, and it carried traces of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut, pop art and abstract expressionism, all of it shot through with her own life story and with psychological and sexual themes. She came to be regarded as one of the most significant artists Japan has produced, ranked among the best-selling women artists in the world, and placed nineteenth on Sotheby's 2023 list of the top fifty artists. Her ideas left their mark on contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
She grew up in Matsumoto and spent a year studying at the Kyoto City University of Arts, learning the traditional Japanese painting style known as nihonga. American abstract impressionism drew her attention and, in 1958, she left for New York City. Through the 1960s she belonged to the city's avant-garde, and to the pop-art movement in particular. When the hippie counterculture gathered force late in that decade, she took to it wholeheartedly, and it was her series of happenings, in which naked participants were covered in brightly coloured dots, that first brought her wide public notice. The 1970s were leaner years, when her work drew little attention, but interest revived in the 1980s and returned her art to view. From the 1950s onwards she went on making work that was shown in museums across the world.
Kusama spoke openly about her mental health. From the 1970s until the end of her life she lived in a mental health facility, and she described art as the means by which she gave form to what troubled her. "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art", she told an interviewer in 2012. "I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live."
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), retold in our own words. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
5Yayoi Kusama in 2005. Screenshot from the video "Yayoi Kusama poses for Klaus Guingand" filmed by Muriel Guingand.
by People Forever
Yayoi Kusama from "art is (Speaking Portraits) [Vol. I]" by George Quasha, (filmed approx. 2002-2005). Uploaded to Vimeo by George Quasha under CC-BY-3.0 Unport
by People Forever
Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin
by People Forever
Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room was inspired by the earlier Infinity Mirror Room that she created in 2015.
by People Forever
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