Yayoi Kusama: The Complete Story
Yayoi Kusama is the Japanese artist of polka dots and mirrored infinity, the most successful living woman artist in the world. Her dotted pumpkins, her endless mirror rooms and her nets of repeated marks come straight out of the hallucinations she has lived with since she was a child.
The dots are not a brand gimmick. They are how she has survived. Her art and her mental health are the same story told two ways.
Born: Matsumoto, Japan, 1929
Known for: polka dots, Infinity Mirror Rooms, dotted pumpkins
Lives: Tokyo, where she has chosen to live in a psychiatric facility since 1977
Three for later
Three that changed how I look at a picture:
The Arnolfini Portrait, detail by detail, the mirror, the dog, and the question everyone asks
Luncheon of the Boating Party, detail by detail, who everybody at that table actually was
Ten women artists you need to know, the names the textbooks skipped
The hallucinations behind the dots
As a girl Kusama saw fields of dots and nets covering everything around her, walls, flowers, her own hands, threatening to swallow her up. She began drawing them to take control of the visions, a process she calls self obliteration.
That childhood experience became her lifelong subject. To cover a surface, or a whole room, in repeated dots is to make the terrifying vision into something she commands.
New York and the happenings
In the late 1950s she moved to New York with little money and pushed into the avant garde. She made vast Infinity Net paintings, soft sculptures covered in stuffed forms, and staged provocative nude happenings, painting dots on bodies as political protest.
She was ahead of her male peers in several ideas, and felt overlooked at the time. She returned to Japan in the 1970s, exhausted.
Choosing the hospital
Since 1977 Kusama has lived, by her own choice, in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, with her studio a short walk away. She goes to work each day and returns at night.
Far from ending her career, that stability fueled an extraordinary late surge. In her eighties and nineties she became a global phenomenon.
Pumpkins, mirrors and Louis Vuitton
Her Infinity Mirror Rooms, small chambers lined with mirrors and lights that seem to stretch forever, draw enormous queues around the world.
Her yellow dotted pumpkins are beloved icons, and she has twice collaborated with Louis Vuitton on dot covered fashion.
She crosses freely between fine art and pop culture, which has made her one of the most photographed and shared artists alive.
Quick answers about Yayoi Kusama
What is Yayoi Kusama known for?
Polka dots, Infinity Mirror Rooms and dotted pumpkins. See what is abstract art.
Why does she use dots?
They come from lifelong hallucinations she manages by covering surfaces in repeated marks.
Does she live in a hospital?
Yes, by choice, in a Tokyo psychiatric facility since 1977, with her studio nearby.
Why she still matters
Kusama turned a frightening illness into one of the most joyful and immersive bodies of art ever made, and did it as a woman who was long overlooked. Step into a mirror room and her whole life makes sense at once.
One last fact. She is regularly the top selling living female artist at auction, and at over 90 she still goes to the studio almost every day.