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Artist Yayoi Kusama transfixed the world with her unique perspective — often expressed by blanketing her canvases, sculptures and museum installations in a mesmerizing, endless swarm of her trademark polka dots.
Kusama, whose death at 97 in a hospital in Tokyo was announced on Thursday by her studio, became one of Japan’s most revered contemporary artists. Her art travelled the globe to be exhibited in famous galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum Ludwig in Germany.
Perhaps among her most famous creations, her Infinity Mirror Rooms installations have spawned long queues at museums, including at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario where visitors flocked to see the Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors exhibition in 2018. The show’s popularity led the gallery to purchase, with crowdfunded support, the permanent installation Infinity Mirrored Room — Let’s Survive Forever.
Like her signature orange bob wig, her works have become instantly recognizable, featuring her trademark repetitive psychedelic motifs that include bright, colourful swirls, worms, netting, and most often polka dots, sparkling balls or dots of lights.
Kusama frequently said she painted the way she saw the world: covered in spots, much like the hallucinations she said she had from childhood.
She dealt with years of mental health challenges and recurring visits to psychiatric institutions and was once ostracized by the cultural elite in Japan for her avant-garde style, according to the New York Times. And yet despite those challenges, the artist, whose canon includes installations with phallic fabric sculptures and naked performance pieces, provoked public discourse and became a fixture of the art world.
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, and moved to the United States to pursue her art in 1957.
In the late ’60s, while Kusama lived in New York City, she held “happening” antiwar performances where she painted circles on people’s bodies and, once, even a horse. While the performances gained media attention they also resulted in arrests for obscenity.
“I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw,” she told The Associated Press during an interview in 2012. “I will keep painting until I die.”
As her fame grew, fashion brands began to take notice. Kusama signed on with Louis Vuitton in 2012 under then-creative director Marc Jacobs. She also signed on with other licensed products, with her illustrations appearing on teacups, key chains and T-shirts.
Kusama was a visionary not only on canvas and sculpture but in other mediums; the artist was also a filmmaker and author, having published several novels. She told The Associated Press that her creative process was so mysterious that there were times when she even surprised herself.
“I think, ‘Oh I drew that? I was thinking that,'” she said.
