Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s most influential contemporary artists, best known for her mirrored “Infinity Rooms,” immersive light installations that suggest endless space, and for monumental polka-dot sculptures. Her whimsical visual language masks a lifetime shaped by persistent mental-health challenges that she has translated into art.
Kusama began seeing hallucinations around age ten, visions of dots and net patterns that seemed to consume her surroundings. She later connected those experiences to the emotional strain of growing up with a distant mother who discouraged her painting and pushed traditional behavior. Rather than hiding from these persistent visions, Kusama has made them the source of her creativity. “My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease,” she told Bomb Magazine.
After studying at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, Kusama exhibited in her native Matsumoto and attracted attention for speaking openly about her mental health at a time when stigma was widespread. Stephan Diederich, curator of her retrospective at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, has described Kusama’s art as both a survival strategy and a form of therapy she embraced without letting it entirely define her.
Born March 22, 1929, Kusama found postwar Japan repressive and in her early twenties described the period as “my era of mental breakdown,” feeling like “a prisoner surrounded by a curtain of depersonalization.” Seeking freedom, she moved to New York in 1958; her mother financed the move on the condition Kusama not return to Japan. Early recognition from figures such as Georgia O’Keeffe helped her establish a foothold in the U.S.
In New York Kusama worked obsessively, producing a prolific body of work. Her meticulously repetitive “Infinity Net” paintings drew notice for their hypnotic patterns, while her soft fabric sculptures often explored sexual forms. Although her aesthetics intersected with contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, Kusama has maintained that she was setting precedents that influenced others. Commercial success, however, arrived unevenly: male peers frequently achieved greater recognition, a disparity that contributed to Kusama’s attempted suicide, which she survived.
Sexual imagery and phallic motifs recur in her art as a way of confronting what she described as a “fear of sex as something dirty.” Works such as the 1964 installation Traveling Life — a ladder embedded with phallic forms and women’s shoes — critiqued gender roles and value in the art world.
In the 1960s Kusama organized provocative happenings that protested the Vietnam War and aimed to dissolve social barriers. Some events included nudity and sexual acts, enacted to argue that shared pleasure might counteract forces that lead to violence. She pursued a concept she called “self-obliteration,” covering nude bodies in dots to erase individuality and merge with the infinite: “By obliterating one’s self, you return to the infinite universe.”
Her 1966 action Narcissus Garden — 1,500 mirrored spheres laid on the Venice Biennale lawn and offered for sale at $2 each without invitation — was a pointed critique of art’s commercialization. Officials halted the sales, but the gesture remains a defining moment of protest in her career.
Kusama officially represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993. After years of marginalization she openly acknowledged a hunger for fame; recognition followed. Major museum shows have drawn enormous crowds: The Broad in Los Angeles sold some 90,000 advance tickets for a Kusama exhibition in 2018, and a year-long Tate Modern retrospective in 2022 sold out and was extended. Her works now fetch millions at auction.
In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan and chose to live in a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, where she still receives treatment. Despite this, she remains extraordinarily productive, continuing to make paintings, sculptures and installations shown around the world. “I will continue to create artwork as long as my passion keeps me doing so,” she has said. “I create art for the healing of all mankind.”
The Museum Ludwig in Cologne is showing the retrospective “Yayoi Kusama” until October 2, 2026.
This article was originally written in German.