Yayoi Kusama is one of Japan’s foremost contemporary artists, best known for her Instagram-friendly “Infinity Rooms” — immersive installations of mirrors, lights and reflective surfaces that create the illusion of endless space — and for large-scale polka-dot sculptures. Though often playful, her work is rooted in a life shaped by persistent mental-health struggles.
Kusama began experiencing hallucinations around age 10, seeing dots and net-like patterns that seemed to cover everything. She links those early visions to the strain of growing up with an unloving mother who forbade her from painting and pressured her toward traditional roles. Kusama has continued to experience hallucinations but learned to channel them into art. “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 mounted her first shows in her hometown of Matsumoto. At a time when mental illness carried heavy stigma, she spoke openly about her condition — something Stephan Diederich, curator of the Kusama retrospective at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig (on show until August 2, 2026), calls extraordinary. For Kusama, art became both survival and therapy, Diederich said.
Born March 22, 1929, Kusama found postwar Japan stifling. Her parents repeatedly tried to arrange marriages and enforce conformity, and in her early 20s she described a “mental breakdown” and a sense of depersonalization. Determined to pursue an independent career, she moved to New York in 1958. Her mother funded the move on the condition that Kusama never return to Japan.
In New York Kusama entered the avant-garde scene. Georgia O’Keeffe, who had previously received Kusama’s work, helped her gain a foothold. Kusama worked prolifically, producing obsessive “Infinity Net” paintings and soft fabric sculptures — sometimes with phallic forms — that paralleled and at times anticipated approaches later seen in artists like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Kusama has asserted she set benchmarks her male contemporaries later drew upon, though precise artistic precedence is hard to prove.
Commercial barriers and gender bias contributed to a period of deep despair that included a suicide attempt she survived. Her 1964 sculpture Traveling Life — a ladder covered with phallic shapes and women’s shoes — critiqued gender inequality and the sexual double standards she wrestled with; Kusama has written about a “fear of sex as something dirty” that recurs in her work.
In the 1960s she staged provocative “happenings” that protested the Vietnam War. These events sometimes included nudity and sexual acts, though Kusama often said she did not take part in the sexual elements herself. Painting nude bodies covered in dots was a tactic she used to erase individuality in what she called “self-obliteration”: by eliminating the separate self, she wrote, one returns to an infinite universe.
Kusama’s 1966 Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennale — 1,500 mirrored spheres placed on the lawn and offered for sale at $2 each — was an uninvited intervention that critiqued the commercialization of art. Biennale officials eventually stopped the sale, but the action remains a pointed statement on art and commerce.
Her recognition grew over decades. Kusama officially represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993. She later said she wanted “to become more famous, even more famous,” reflecting how vital recognition became for her career. Recent years have seen blockbuster interest: The Broad in Los Angeles sold tens of thousands of advance tickets for a Kusama show in 2018, and a yearlong Tate Modern exhibition in 2022 rapidly sold out (and was later extended). Her works now fetch millions at auction.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and chose to live in a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, where she continues to receive treatment while remaining highly productive. She still produces paintings, sculptures and installations that travel the world. “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,” she has said. “I create art for the healing of all mankind.”
The Museum Ludwig in Cologne is showing the retrospective “Yayoi Kusama” until August 2, 2026.
This article was originally written in German.