Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s foremost contemporary artists, famed for Instagram-ready “Infinity Rooms” — mirrored, light-filled installations that create the illusion of endless space — and for large-scale polka-dot sculptures. Her playful visual language conceals a life shaped by long-term mental-health struggles.
Kusama began experiencing hallucinations around age ten, seeing dots and net patterns that seemed to envelop everything. She later linked these visions to the psychological strain of growing up with an unloving mother who forbade her painting and tried to enforce traditional behavior. Kusama has learned to live with her hallucinations by channeling them into art. “My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease,” she told Bomb Magazine.
After training at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, Kusama mounted early exhibitions in her hometown of Matsumoto and stood out for being unusually open about her mental health at a time when stigma was strong. Stephan Diederich, curator of the Kusama retrospective at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, says that art for her was both a survival strategy and a form of therapy that she acknowledged without letting it define everything she did.
Born March 22, 1929, Kusama found postwar Japan stifling. In her early twenties she called the period “my era of mental breakdown,” feeling like “a prisoner surrounded by a curtain of depersonalization.” Determined to pursue her own path, she moved to New York in 1958. Her mother provided financial support on the condition Kusama never return to Japan. Artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who had received some of Kusama’s early work, helped her gain a foothold in the U.S.
Kusama worked obsessively and produced a vast output. Her meticulously repetitive “Infinity Net” paintings drew notice for their hypnotic patterns; she also made soft, often phallic fabric sculptures. Her approach aligned in some ways with contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, but she has insisted she set benchmarks that others later drew on. Commercial success, however, came later and unequally: male peers often fared better, a disparity that contributed to Kusama’s attempted suicide, which she survived.
Sexual imagery and phallic motifs recur in Kusama’s work as a means of processing a “fear of sex as something dirty,” a theme she explored in her autobiography. Her 1964 sculpture Traveling Life — a ladder studded with phallic forms and women’s shoes — commented on gender and value in the art world.
In the 1960s Kusama staged provocative “happenings” that protested the Vietnam War. These events sometimes involved nudity and sexual acts, intended to dissolve barriers between people; she argued that shared pleasure could counter the forces that lead to violence. Painting nude bodies covered in dots, she pursued a concept she called “self-obliteration”: erasing individuality to merge with the infinite universe. “By obliterating one’s self, you return to the infinite universe,” she has said.
Her 1966 action Narcissus Garden — 1,500 mirrored spheres laid out on the lawn outside the Venice Biennale, offered for sale at $2 each without having been invited — critiqued the commercialization of art and the role of artists in a market-driven world. Officials stopped the sale, but the gesture remains a landmark moment in her career.
Kusama returned to the Venice Biennale officially in 1993, representing Japan. She has openly admitted a desire to be famous, reflecting how important recognition became for her after decades of marginalization. Fame did follow: The Broad Museum in Los Angeles sold 90,000 advance tickets for a Kusama exhibition in 2018; a year-long Tate Modern show in London in 2022 sold out and was extended. Her works now command millions at auction.
In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan and chose to live in a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, where she continues treatment. Despite this, she remains prolific, producing paintings, sculptures, installations and other works shown worldwide. “I will continue to create artwork as long as my passion keeps me doing so. I am deeply moved that so many people have been my fans. I suppose I would not be able to know how people would evaluate my art until after I die. I create art for the healing of all mankind,” she has said.
The Museum Ludwig in Cologne is showing the retrospective “Yayoi Kusama” until October 2, 2026.
This article was originally written in German.
