Yayoi Kusama, Artist of Infinite Dots, Dies at 97
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots and mirrored rooms drew queues at museums on five continents, has died at the age of 97.
Kusama died on 14 August 2026 of multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo, according to Kyodo news agency, as reported by The Straits Times The Straits Times. Her company, Yayoi Kusama Studio, announced the death in a statement posted to her official website on Thursday, 27 August 2026 The Guardian; The Japan Times.
The gap of nearly two weeks between her death and the public announcement was not explained in the studio's statement.
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a mountain city in central Japan, and studied traditional Nihonga painting in Kyoto before leaving for the United States in 1957. She arrived in New York at a moment when Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art were colliding, and her work — vast accumulations of dots she called "infinity nets," soft sculptures she titled "accumulations," and room-sized installations lined with mirrors — sat at the seam between them.
She returned to Japan in the early 1970s and, by her own account, chose to live in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo from 1973 onward, maintaining a studio nearby. She spoke openly about the visual and auditory hallucinations she had experienced since childhood — the nets and dots that covered her canvases were, she said, a way of confronting those visions rather than escaping them.
In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, Kusama published a message through her gallery, David Zwirner, in which she described herself as "Revolutionist of the world by the Art" and commanded the virus "to Disappear from this earth" David Zwirner.
Her book Every Day I Pray for Love, published in connection with David Zwirner in 2021, was described as her most personal book to date, offering readers a window into her creative process David Zwirner.
In 2017, at the age of 88, she opened her own museum in Tokyo's Shinjuku ward, a five-storey building devoted to her work David Zwirner.
For a general audience that may have encountered her work without knowing her name: Kusama was the artist behind the pumpkin sculptures covered in dots that appeared at art fairs and museum galleries, and behind the "Infinity Mirror Rooms" — small, mirror-lined chambers filled with coloured lights or soft sculptures that created the illusion of endless space. Those rooms became some of the most photographed installations in the museum world, with visitors regularly lining up for timed entries of less than a minute.
Kusama was among the most commercially successful living artists for much of her later career, with her work commanding eight-figure sums at auction. Her paintings, sculptures and installations are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
