Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama dies aged 97
Renowned artist Yayoi Kusama, who shot to stardom after spending decades of her life in a psychiatric hospital, has died aged 97
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who shot to stardom after spending decades in a psychiatric hospital, has died aged 97.
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The artist, distinguished by her iconic bright red bobbed wig, was known for her psychedelic artworks and “infinity mirror room” installations.
Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on August 14th, her company Yayoi Kusama Inc. announced on Thursday, and remembered her as a “pioneering avant-garde artist.”
In a statement, they wrote: “Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry.”
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“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul.”
“We will carry forward Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world.”
Kusama’s exhibitions quickly grew in popularity on social media for their “instagrammable” qualities, as images of art-goers popped up across online platforms. Her 2024 exhibition in Australia was the most popular in the country’s history.
Kusama’s career traversed a range of artistic disciplines: from the immersive exhibitions to “body festivals” inviting naked performers covered in polka dots on stage.
She even wrote to US president Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in return for ending the Vietnam War. The move was met with horror from Kusama’s conservative family at home.
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, and suffered a difficult childhood under the care of an abusive mother and a cheating father.
As a child, she would spend her days in her wealthy family’s plant nurseries drawing, despite her mother’s efforts to stop her.
She began experiencing hallucinations, in which the plants would begin moving around and talking to her. To cope, she would draw what she saw.
During the Second World War, at the age of 13, Kusama was conscripted to create fabric for Japanese army parachutes. She would go on to study Nihonga, a traditional Japanese style of painting, but would become bored with the style.
She went on to reject the future of a planned marriage and children and, in 1958, moved to New York. There, she fell in love with artist and theorist Donald Judd and found success with her “infinity net” paintings.
In 1962, she sold the first of these to artists Frank Stella and Judd for $75. In 2014, Kusama sold one of these paintings, known as White No 28, for a record-breaking $7.1m (£5.7m), making history for a living female artist.
She would go on to become synonymous with controversy. In 1968 she held New York’s first “homosexual wedding” in Tribeca, and cleaned a “dirty” Soviet flag outside the UN headquarters in protest of the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
She struggled mentally during her time in New York and was frequently admitted to hospital. Following the death of her close friend Joseph Cornell in 1972, she began to experience hallucinations, panic attacks and attempted suicide.
She checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in 1977, which offered art therapy and decided to live there permanently, as the institution allowed her to pursue her art with the support of stability and structure.
By the beginning of the 1990s, interest in Kusama’s work had declined, despite the artist having published several novels.
Her work began to shift towards the installations that she was known for in later life – including the immersive exhibitions that would go on to become so popular.
Retrospectives for Kusama were held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1998, Tate Modern in London in 2012 and Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum in 2017.
Her shows sold out so quickly that fans would queue for hours for just a 30-second experience in her exhibitions.
Despite the worldwide fame that Kusama accrued, she preferred to think of herself as an outcast.
“I cannot imagine how I will be classified after my death,” she said. “It feels good to be an outsider.”