Yayoi Kusama, now 97, remains one of Japan’s most recognizable contemporary artists — beloved on social platforms for her immersive “Infinity Rooms” of mirrors and lights and for her bold polka-dot sculptures. Those Instagram-ready spectacles, however, spring from a life long shaped by persistent mental-health struggles.
Kusama began seeing hallucinations around age 10: dots and net-like patterns that seemed to cover surfaces and people. She later linked those early visions to a harsh childhood in which an unloving mother forbade her from painting and pushed her toward traditional roles. Rather than silencing her, those experiences became the raw material for a career in art. “My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease,” she told Bomb Magazine, turning private pain into public work.
After training at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, Kusama held her first exhibitions in her hometown of Matsumoto. At a time when mental illness was highly stigmatized, she spoke openly about her condition — a frankness Stephan Diederich, curator of the Kusama retrospective at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, calls extraordinary. For Kusama, Diederich says, art has served as both survival and therapy.
Born on March 22, 1929, Kusama found postwar Japan restrictive. Her parents repeatedly tried to arrange marriages and enforce conformity; she experienced a “mental breakdown” and depersonalization in her early 20s. Determined to work independently, she moved to New York in 1958, financed by her mother on the condition that she never return to Japan.
In New York Kusama entered the avant-garde scene. Support from figures such as Georgia O’Keeffe helped her gain footing, and she worked prolifically: obsessive “Infinity Net” paintings, soft fabric sculptures with suggestive forms, and performance-based happenings. Her approaches often paralleled or anticipated techniques later associated with artists like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, and Kusama has argued that her work set benchmarks male contemporaries later used.
Commercial barriers and gender bias took a toll. Kusama endured a period of deep despair, surviving a suicide attempt. Her 1964 sculpture Traveling Life — a ladder studded with phallic shapes and women’s shoes — confronted gender inequality and the sexual double standards that haunted her. She has written about a recurring “fear of sex as something dirty,” a theme that surfaces repeatedly in her art.
During the 1960s Kusama staged provocative “happenings” and antiwar performances, some involving nudity and sexual acts; she often maintained that she did not personally take part in the sexual elements. One persistent tactic was painting nude bodies covered in dots — a practice she called “self-obliteration,” intended to erase individuality and dissolve the separate self back into an infinite universe.
Her 1966 intervention at the Venice Biennale, Narcissus Garden, consisted of 1,500 mirrored spheres placed on the lawn and offered for sale at $2 each. The uninvited installation critiqued the commercialization of art; officials eventually halted the sale, but the action endures as a sharp statement on art and commerce.
Recognition grew slowly but steadily. Kusama officially represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and she later spoke candidly about wanting “to become more famous, even more famous,” reflecting how crucial recognition had become to her work. In recent years her popularity has exploded: timed-ticket exhibitions at The Broad in Los Angeles and a yearlong Tate Modern show drew huge crowds, and her pieces now command millions at auction.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and chose to live in a psychiatric clinic in Tokyo, where she continues to receive care while remaining extraordinarily productive. She still produces paintings, sculptures and traveling installations. “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 retrospective “Yayoi Kusama” is on view at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig through August 2, 2026. This piece was originally written in German.