From the obsessive Infinity Nets she began painting in New York to the mirrored rooms that would eventually draw millions of visitors around the world, Yayoi Kusama spent more than seven decades exploring one extraordinary idea: that the boundaries between ourselves, one another and the universe might disappear.
The Japanese artist, who became one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary art, died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 at the age of 97. Her death was announced by her studio on 27 August. She continued painting until her final days.
Known globally as the Queen of Polka Dots, Kusama transformed one of art’s simplest forms into a visual language of infinity, repetition and connection. But the dots were never simply a signature style. For Kusama, they were a way of becoming part of something larger.
Yayoi Kusama’s Journey From Japan to New York
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began creating art as a child. She described experiencing vivid visions in which patterns, flowers and dots appeared to multiply around her, covering both herself and her surroundings
After studying the traditional Japanese painting style Nihonga in Kyoto, Kusama became increasingly drawn towards abstraction. In 1957 she left Japan for the United States and soon settled in New York, where she became part of the city’s rapidly changing avant-garde scene.
It was there that she began creating her Infinity Net paintings: enormous surfaces covered with thousands of tiny, repeated loops. There was no obvious beginning, centre or end. The repetition could seemingly continue beyond the limits of the canvas.
In 1965, Kusama created her first Infinity Mirror Room, taking these ideas beyond the canvas. Mirrors multiplied objects and reflections endlessly, allowing visitors to physically enter her vision of infinity.
Why Yayoi Kusama Used Polka Dots
Polka dots would eventually become inseparable from Kusama’s image. They appeared across paintings, sculptures, pumpkins, furniture, entire rooms and even across Kusama herself. The repetition reflected Kusama’s concept of self-obliteration: the disappearance of individual boundaries into something larger.
This idea is particularly visible in The Obliteration Room, where visitors add colourful dot stickers to an initially white space. Over time, hundreds of individual contributions merge into one collective artwork. Rather than simply asking audiences to observe her work, Kusama made them part of it.
From Avant-Garde Outsider to Global Phenomenon
Across her career, Kusama created some of contemporary art’s most famous immersive installations and helped redefine the relationship between artwork, space and viewer.
Her pumpkins, another motif that followed her throughout her life, became nearly as recognisable as her dots. Kusama had first encountered pumpkins as a child, and their irregular, organic forms returned repeatedly in drawings, sculptures and installations. In 1993, pumpkins featured prominently when she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale — becoming the first woman to do so.
Whatever medium she chose, the underlying questions remained remarkably consistent: repetition, infinity, life, death, love and our place within a universe larger than ourselves.
In 2016, she received Japan’s prestigious Order of Culture. The following year, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo. Her exhibitions continued attracting enormous audiences well into her nineties: a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which ran from December 2024 to April 2025, welcomed more than 570,000 visitors, setting a new attendance record for the museum.
Today, queues for her Infinity Rooms can stretch through museums, her monumental pumpkins have become landmarks and her dots are instantly recognisable far beyond the traditional art world.
Yayoi Kusama’s Legacy
It is easy to remember Yayoi Kusama through her most famous symbols: the red wig, the pumpkins, the mirrors and, of course, the polka dots. However, her legacy lies in what she made those symbols do. She took something as small as a dot and used it to imagine something without limits. She covered objects until they seemed to merge with their surroundings. She transformed rooms until their walls appeared to vanish. She placed mirrors around visitors until they became part of the artwork themselves. And through that process, Kusama connected art and environment, artist and audience, the individual and the infinite. Her work was intensely personal, yet it became collective. Millions of people entered her installations and, for a moment, saw themselves reflected within the same endless universe.
Following her death, her studio wrote that Kusama remained committed throughout her life to the belief that art could bring “hope and strength for the future” to people around the world. Perhaps that is the most fitting way to understand what she leaves behind.
Yayoi Kusama did not simply turn the world into her art. She used art to connect us to it and to one another.
Content writer on the marketing team at Singulart, where she started her journey in sales before moving into Content management and marketing. Originally from the US and based in Paris, she writes about art interiors. Work with many different communities of both artist and creatives, she knows what it means to build and nourish a creative vision.
