When news of 97-year-old pop culture icon Yayoi Kusama’s death was announced on August 27 (she died on August 14), the art community collectively mourned. For decades, Kusama’s signature polka dots have danced their way into museum exhibits and outdoor installations, sparking joy for her many devoted fans.
Through her paintings, sculptures, performances, poetry, books, films and other methods of expression, Kusama shared her vision of an infinite universe for some 72 years. And that vision usually included dots representing points of light that she obsessively portrayed as eternal life.
Not only do prestigious galleries embrace Kusama’s art, but her installations also decorate shopping malls and outdoor plazas. And, her brightly-colored, twisted, asymmetrical pumpkins covered in dots appear in parks and public art sites globally.
Those ubiquitous polka dots are synonymous with Kusama who often wore clothing adorned with them. In fact, her dots became so commercialized that they are imprinted on coffee cups, keychains and ballpoint pens. In 2012, Kusama even partnered with Louis Vuitton to have her famous polka dots embellish his famous handbags. In appreciation, a giant look-alike Kusama statue was erected at his Paris flagship store.
With a single painting once selling for $10.5 million and an entire collection for $15 million, Kusama has been considered the world’s highest paid female artist.
Yet in spite of her immense popularity and tremendous financial success, she chose to live in Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill since 1977. Her studio, two blocks away, functioned as her workspace, but the hospital is where she called home. There, her psychological issues were managed while she utilized the facility’s art therapy program.
The youngest of four children, Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. Her family owned a large wholesale seed business on an expansive farm that also cultivated flowers and pumpkins. Unfortunately, Kusama’s parents had a contentious marriage and she was recruited by her mother to spy on her philanderer father and his mistresses. This, Kusama has stated, caused her irreparable trauma. She also recalled once being lost and panicking in a field of flowers on their estate. Later, as an adult, she wrote a letter to American artist Georgia O’Keeffe after seeing her paintings of oversized flowers.
Although Kusama showed an early interest in art, her mother discouraged it by destroying her doodles and sketches. Kusama’s traditional Japanese parents only wanted their daughter to marry a wealthy man.
Kusama has said that she always saw floating dots and that, later on, realized that she had been hallucinating since childhood. She attributed this to the fear, anxiety and pain she constantly experienced from a young age.
Her first exhibit was held in Matsumoto, but no one came. Kusama then burned 2,000 of her paintings near a river before leaving Japan.
In 1957, she arrived in Seattle with thousands of U.S. dollars sewn inside her clothing and hidden inside her shoes. During her flight, Kusama became aware of what she called “infinity nets” — the surface waves on the ocean as she peered at them from the airplane’s window. Those images would later appear prominently in her work, too.
Kusama was embraced by the Seattle Japanese American arts community after being introduced to George Tstutakawa and Paul Horiuchi by an art dealer. But by 1958, she was living in New York City. There, she struggled to make a name for herself as she endured humiliating rejection by local galleries. While her paintings intrigued dealers, she was often dismissed for being a female foreigner. Often dressed in trendy miniskirts and body-hugging red leotards, with her jet black hair hanging past her shoulders, Kusama was the epitome of a swinging 1960’s Mod fashionista. But on special occasions, she wore kimono.
Those who knew her at the time described her as “aggressive” because she resorted to unusual tactics to make her art known. She also searched for a wealthy male patron and found him in surrealist Joseph Cornell. When she discovered that he disliked sex as much as she claimed to, they ended up together for a decade. Unfortunately, their relationship ended with his death.
Highly innovative, Kusama watched helplessly as several well-known white male artists, including Andy Warhol, copied her clever installation pieces. By then, she had created her concept of infinity with lights, mirrors and spaces in a gallery environment. Years later, she would exhibit her “Infinity Mirror Rooms” where hundreds of LED lights glowed and bounced off mirrored walls, floors and ceilings to create the sensation of being surrounded by the galaxy.
In 1966, after constantly being ripped-off drove her to the brink of suicide, Kusama leaped from a window only to land on a bicycle which saved her life.
That same year, she traveled to Europe and, uninvited, staged an exhibition of silver balls called “The Narcissus Garden” at the Venice Biennale. She even attempted to sell the balls to “narcissists” attending the event.
Back in New York, Kusama’s avant-garde approach led her to painting dots on participants’ naked skin. She also officiated gay wedding “happenings” as she called them. Because she was near middle-age, never married and childless, she attracted many gay friends then.
Always attempting to meld reality and illusion, Kusama made a film, “Kusama’s Self Obliteration”, where she stood in waist-deep water painting red dots on a board that floated away.
The 1970’s U.S. involvement in Vietnam brought back horrific memories of WWII Japan when Kusama was forced to sew Army uniforms and parachutes at age 13. In protest over Vietnam, she began performing naked in some of her staged “happenings.” She even wrote a letter to then-president Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him if he would withdraw troops from Vietnam.
In 1973, her mental health rapidly declining, Kusama returned to Japan. Seeking refuge, she was rebuffed by Japanese who were shocked by her outrageous behavior depicted in magazines. Her family was so ashamed that they bought every publication featuring her antics to make them unavailable to the public.
Forgotten by the world and alienated in Japan, Kusama contemplated suicide before committing herself to the hospital where she lived for the rest of her life. In her later years, her unsmiling face, anxious eyes, and bright crimson Dutch boy wigs with matching lipstick evoked an abandoned child. But eventually, her popularity grew and Kusama’s hometown houses a permanent collection of her work.
However, shortly before her 2023 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, a scandal broke when racist remarks surfaced from Kusama’s 2003 autobiography, “Infinity Net”. Besides writing that Black people had a “distinctive smell” and “animalistic sex techniques,” she also described a naked Black man’s lips and genitals from one of her performance pieces. Additionally, she wrote that her former Greenwich Village neighborhood had become a slum due to “Black people shooting each other”.
Kusama issued a statement of apology, and the show continued.
Writer Dexter Thomas, a Black Fullbright scholar living in Japan, pointed out that Kusama had likely encountered very few Black people in Japan. Instead, he speculated, she probably echoed the disdain that her white counterparts expressed towards Black people after she arrived in the U.S. There was also her mental illness to consider
As Kusama’s legions of fans grow exponentially, her polka dots, pumpkins and infinite lights urge universal togetherness. Hopefully, her clay feet won’t overshadow her stellar accomplishments.
