Every Gate: Yayoi Kusama, 1929–2026

Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital. She was 97. Her studio announced it today, noting that she “continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush.”

She had spent the last 49 of those years living by choice in a psychiatric institution, with a studio nearby she went to every morning. The gates stacked against her life — family, country, industry, history, her own mind — are the through-line of an eight-decade career. She went through every one of them, usually uninvited.

The family

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto to a seed-merchant family, she started seeing visions around age ten — fields of dots and flashes of light pouring over everything she looked at. Her earliest recorded drawing, a 1939 portrait of her mother, is already being swallowed by spots. That was the year she turned ten.

Her mother’s response was to tear up the drawings and confiscate the paints. The family plan was a good marriage — they offered to buy her kimono, never brushes — and when the marriage couldn’t be arranged, she was sent instead to spy on her father’s affairs. During the war she worked twelve-hour shifts in a parachute factory and kept drawing anyway.

The country

She studied nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, in Kyoto and found it a cage. In 1955 she did something absurd and correct: she wrote a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist she had never met, asking how one survives as an artist. O’Keeffe answered on December 4, 1955 — warned her that “in this country the artist has a hard time to make a living,” and told her to “show your art to everyone you can.”

Kusama later called O’Keeffe “my first and greatest benefactor.” One woman answering another across the world — that was the first gate that opened. In 1957 she left Japan for America with sixty kimonos and a portfolio of drawings.

The art world

New York in the late ’50s had no shelf for a Japanese woman painting vast, quiet, obsessive nets of dots while action painting splattered across the magazines. She was so broke she worked through the night to keep warm in her studio. In 1962, Frank Stella and Donald Judd bought one of her Infinity Net paintings for $75.

She kept moving regardless. Stuffed, sewn phallic sculptures covering furniture and ladders in 1963 — her way of metabolizing a childhood that taught her sex was dirty and shameful. The first Infinity Mirror Room in 1965. And in 1966, without an invitation, she installed Narcissus Garden on the lawn of the Venice Biennale: 1,500 mirrored balls, which she hawked at $2 apiece under a banner reading “Your narcissism for sale” until the organizers removed her. She was performing a critique of the art market from inside the art market, a decade before the market conceded she existed.

She maintained until the end that many of her ideas were appropriated by the white male artists around her — Andy Warhol among them — while she was written out of the history being written in real time.

Meanwhile she staged anti-war happenings, body-painting festivals, and what she called New York’s first homosexual wedding, in Tribeca in 1968. She washed a Soviet flag outside the UN over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. She wrote to Nixon offering herself if he would end the Vietnam War. There were obscenity arrests. The press called it shock art; those statements now read as ahead of their time.

The collapse

Joseph Cornell — her devoted, platonic, codependent companion — died in 1972. Her mental health, never stable, broke further: hallucinations, panic attacks, suicide attempts. She returned to Japan in 1973 with her career evaporated and no venues left. In 1977 she checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital that offered art therapy.

She stayed the rest of her life. Studio across the way, painting every day it offered. In the ’80s she wrote novels and poetry while her public presence faded to almost nothing — by the early ’90s, interest in her work had waned almost completely.

The art world had rendered its verdict, and she kept working. Not for the market. Not for history. Because the dots kept coming and painting them was how she stayed alive.

The reversal

In 1993 the Venice Biennale that had ejected her in 1966 gave her the Japanese pavilion — official, celebrated, mirrored, full of pumpkins. The pumpkin went back to childhood too: at eleven, on her grandfather’s farm, she says a pumpkin spoke to her.

Then MoMA in 1998, Tate Modern in 2012, the Hirshhorn in 2017. The Hirshhorn’s Infinity Mirrors drew 160,000 visitors; her 2023 follow-up drew over 480,000 — people standing in line for hours to spend 30 seconds inside her rooms. The woman no gallery would represent became the most-visited exhibition artist alive, and the institutions that once ignored her now sell timed tickets to her infinity. In 2014 White No. 28 sold for $7.1 million, then a record for a living female artist. Louis Vuitton put her dots on handbags twice. Her Yellow Pumpkin on Naoshima became one of Japan’s most photographed objects. Her own museum opened in Tokyo in 2017.

The mind

The hallucinations never stopped. “I still see hallucinations even now,” she said in 2017. “Dots come flying everywhere — on my dress, the floor, things I’m carrying, throughout the house, the ceiling. And I paint them.”

The art was the treatment plan. She called it self-obliteration — dissolving the self into pattern until self and world can’t be told apart. “Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars.”

At the Order of Culture ceremony in 2016 — Japan’s highest artistic honor — she said: “I feel there is little left in my life, but I am now still fighting to the death for my art. I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead.”

Every gate closed on her — her mother, two art worlds, three decades of silence. The dots are everywhere now.