Yayoi Kusama: Infinity in a Polka Dot

Yayoi Kusama turned visions that others may not have understood into a way to heal and make sense of the world. The Japanese artist, who died in Tokyo on Aug. 14, 2026, was regarded as one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and in her country. News of her death emerged on Aug. 27.

Her career extended beyond painting into performance, fiction, fashion and poetry. Her early works reflected the chaotic condition of Japan after the Second World War. When paint and oils were difficult to obtain, she mixed ordinary materials with sand and used seed sacks in place of canvases and oils. In the early 1950s, she made works on paper with ink, pastel, watercolor and tempera, often depicting abstract forms linked to eggs, seeds, trees and flowers.

Kusama moved to New York around 1958 and established herself as a key avant-garde figure, despite the difficulties of adapting to a new country and culture. Her constant experimentation eventually brought worldwide recognition through the Infinity Nets, vast abstract canvases covered with thousands of tiny brushstrokes that resembled perforated meshes.

The idea of infinite space became another defining obsession. In 1965, she created her first Infinity Mirror Room, Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field, for the Floor Show exhibition at New York’s Castellane Gallery. The mirrored room reflected hundreds of fabric phallic forms and marked a turning point in her career. She went on to create more than 20 mirror rooms, making them among the most recognizable elements of her work.

During the 1960s, Kusama staged provocative performances combining opposition to the Vietnam War with nudity and body painting in polka dots. In 1966, she presented Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennale, an installation of hundreds of mirrored spheres that she sold to visitors and that became one of her best-known interventions.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. Economic difficulties and worsening mental-health problems led her to enter Tokyo’s Seiwa psychiatric hospital voluntarily in 1977, and it became her permanent home. The calm of that life allowed her to turn to literature, producing numerous novels, poetry collections and an autobiography.