Yayoi Kusama, the Woman Who Turned Her Hallucinations Into Some of the World's Most Beloved Art, Dies at 97

For nearly seven decades, one woman turned the visions inside her own mind into something millions of strangers would travel across the world to stand inside.

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist whose polka-dot paintings, pumpkin sculptures, and immersive "Infinity Mirror Rooms" made her one of the most commercially successful and widely recognized artists of the modern era, died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo, according to a statement released by her studio and confirmed Thursday. She was 97. No cause of death was given.

"Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry," the statement read. "She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush."

Kusama's story was, by any measure, an unlikely one. Born in 1929 in the rural Japanese town of Matsumoto to parents who ran a plant nursery, she described a difficult childhood marked by a physically abusive mother and a philandering father. She began experiencing hallucinations — flashes of light, dots, and flowers overtaking her field of vision — from an early age, an experience she later transformed into the visual language that would define her entire career. "I still see hallucinations even now," she told reporters as recently as 2017.

At 28, convinced Japanese society was "too small" for what she wanted to create, Kusama moved alone to New York in 1957, arriving into a fiercely male-dominated art scene. She struggled financially and battled suicidal thoughts in those early years, even as she began earning quiet respect from contemporaries like Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell, and Eva Hesse for experimental work that helped pioneer entirely new artistic categories, including what's now known as "soft sculpture" and large-scale installation art.

Her fame, though, didn't reach its full scale until decades later. Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms — enclosed spaces lined with mirrors that made colored lights and objects appear to stretch on forever — became a genuine global phenomenon in the 21st century, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to institutions like Tate Modern in London, the Broad in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. A 2025 exhibition of her work in Australia became the most-visited exhibition in the country's history, drawing more than 500,000 attendees.

Kusama's mental health struggles never fully receded, even as her global stature grew. After 1977, she voluntarily lived in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, continuing to create art from a studio located nearby. In her final years, she was rarely seen in public, even as her installations continued expanding across museums and public spaces worldwide.

Her honors over the decades included Japan's Order of Culture and France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Beyond the museum world, Kusama's polka-dot aesthetic also crossed into fashion and popular culture, most notably through a widely celebrated collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

"We will carry forward Kusama's wishes," her studio's statement concluded, "and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world."

For an artist who once described her own childhood as marked by hallucination and isolation, Kusama's legacy stands as something close to the opposite: art built to be shared, entered, and experienced collectively, by millions of people who never knew her personally, but who stepped inside one of her infinite mirrored rooms and, for a moment, saw the world the way she did.

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