Yayoi Kusama Painted Her Way Out of Hallucinations and Into the World’s Longest Queues

The room Yayoi Kusama slept in for most of her adult life belonged to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, and nobody had sent her there. She asked to be admitted. She kept her studio a short walk down the street and crossed between the two buildings nearly every working day until the end. That arrangement explains her better than any pumpkin sculpture does. The illness and the work were one story, told in dots, and she was painting her way through what she saw long before anyone thought of buying it.

It began with flowers that talked back. As a girl in Matsumoto, a mountain town in Nagano Prefecture where her family traded in seeds and nursery plants, she watched patterns spread off a tablecloth, across the walls and over her own skin, and she drew them to make them hold still. Her mother, by Kusama’s own account, tore the drawings up. The girl kept going anyway, and she wrote to Georgia O’Keeffe, a stranger on the other side of the Pacific, enclosing watercolours and asking how a painter got to America. O’Keeffe answered. The reply worked like an exit visa.

The only formal training she ever had came in Kyoto, where from 1948 she studied nihonga, the rule-bound tradition of Japanese painting. She was nineteen, born on 22 March 1929, and she learned mostly what she did not want to do. In 1957 she flew to Seattle; a year later she was living in New York, short of money and painting through the night on enormous canvases covered edge to edge in small looped strokes. Those were the Infinity Nets, pictures with no centre and no edge worth the name, and Donald Judd was among the first critics to take them seriously.

Painting was not enough to hold the repetition. She began sewing stuffed fabric phalluses and smothering furniture with them, an armchair first, later a whole rowing boat, and in 1965 she built Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field: a mirror-lined space whose floor sprouted hundreds of red-spotted soft forms, reflected into a field with no horizon. The visitor stood inside the pattern and vanished into it. Kusama had a word for that experience, self-obliteration, and she spent the next six decades trying to share it.

At the 1966 Venice Biennale she arrived without an invitation, laid 1,500 mirrored balls across the lawn outside the Italian pavilion and sold them to passers-by for 1,200 lire apiece, roughly two dollars, until the organisers stopped her. Narcissus Garden was a joke about the art market that the art market spent half a century failing to get. Back in New York she staged naked happenings against the Vietnam War, painting dots on bodies opposite the Stock Exchange in 1968, wrote an open letter to Richard Nixon and held an unsanctioned “grand orgy” in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The coverage was enormous. The money was not. Ill and exhausted, she went home in 1973.

Japan did not welcome her. The New York stunts had made her a scandal there rather than a reputation, and in 1977 she checked into Seiwa Hospital in Tokyo, where she would remain a resident. The years that followed were quieter and more literary than the legend admits: novels, among them The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street, poetry, collages, and a slow return to painting. The reversal came in 1993, when she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with a mirrored room full of pumpkins, the same city that had thrown her off the lawn. Retrospectives followed, from Los Angeles and New York in 1998 to Tate Modern and the Whitney in 2012.

The acclaim carried two problems that her admirers tended to step around. The first is what happened to the rooms. Built as places where the self dissolves, the Infinity Mirror Rooms became the most photographed backdrops in contemporary art, entered in timed slots that often last less than a minute and exited with a selfie, while Louis Vuitton put her dots on handbags in 2012 and again, at far greater scale, in 2023. Obliteration turned into a brand, and she signed off on it. The second problem is harder. In October 2023 she apologised, in a statement released through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for racist descriptions of Black people in her autobiography, Infinity Net; similar passages appear in a novel from 1984 and a play from 1971. The apology arrived decades after the words, a point critics raised again in the weeks after her death, and it belongs in any honest account of her.

The late work was prodigious. From 2009 she painted the My Eternal Soul series, hundreds of large square canvases of eyes, faces, cells and dots in flat saturated colour, painted nearly every day into her nineties. In 2017 she opened her own museum, a white five-storey building in Shinjuku, a few streets from the hospital and the studio. Her crowds kept growing: the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne recorded 570,537 visitors for its survey between December 2024 and April 2025, the highest attendance for any ticketed exhibition in the gallery’s history, beating a Van Gogh show from 2017. A European retrospective of more than seven decades of work opened at Fondation Beyeler near Basel in October 2025 and moved to Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where it closed on 2 August 2026.

Twelve days later, on 14 August 2026, she died in a Tokyo hospital of multiple organ failure, aged 97. Her company and studio announced the death on 27 August, adding that she had painted until her final days and never set aside her brush. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened the last leg of the retrospective on 11 September as a posthumous tribute; it runs until 17 January 2027.

Visitors in Amsterdam will queue for the mirror rooms and see themselves repeated past the point of counting. That was always the offer: a woman who feared being swallowed by what she saw turned the swallowing into a place a stranger could walk into, stand inside for a moment and leave intact.

Tags: art, artists, contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama, Donald Judd, Georgia O'Keeffe

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