Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who turned polka dots, pumpkins and mirrored rooms into a global visual language, died on August 14, 2026, at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 97. Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. announced her death on Thursday, August 27, saying she painted until her final days.
The official English statement did not list a cause. Several Japanese and international reports, including Nikkei Asia and The Art Newspaper, said she died of multiple organ failure. A private funeral has already been held for family. A public memorial is planned for a later date.
Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, in Nagano Prefecture. She grew up in a prosperous but harsh household and began drawing as a child while living with hallucinations of dots, nets, flowers and flashing light. Those visions stayed with her. In 2017 she told reporters she still saw them. “Dots come flying everywhere on my dress, the floor, things I’m carrying, throughout the house, the ceiling. And I paint them.”
She moved to New York in 1958 after writing to Georgia O’Keeffe for advice. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she made vast “Infinity Net” paintings, then covered furniture, clothes and a rowboat with stuffed fabric phalluses. She staged Happenings, body-painting events and anti-war performances that put her at the center of the downtown scene and also left her exhausted and often broke.
She returned to Japan in 1973. In 1977 she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and lived there by choice for the rest of her life, commuting to a nearby studio. Art, she said, was how she stayed alive. “If it hadn’t been for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,” she wrote in an essay titled “Why do I create art?”
Recognition arrived late. In 1993 she became the first Japanese artist to represent her country with a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale. Museum crowds followed in the 2000s and 2010s as her Infinity Mirror Rooms became appointment viewing and social media destinations. A 2017 survey at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington drew about 475,000 visitors. A 2024-25 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne drew 570,537 people, the most attended ticketed show in that museum’s history.
The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood in 2017. David Zwirner, who represented her in the United States from 2013, said after her death that she was “without a doubt the most famous living artist in the world.” He recalled hour-long lines when she last visited New York, in 2013, for an exhibition at his gallery.
The market caught up. Works routinely sold for more than $1 million. In 2022, “Untitled (Nets)” from 1959 sold for $10.5 million. Collaborations with Louis Vuitton in 2012 and again in 2023 put her dots on handbags, storefronts and city streets. She received Japan’s Order of Culture in 2016.
Later in life she was a small figure in a bright red wig, still producing the “My Eternal Soul” paintings and pumpkin sculptures that museums booked years in advance. The studio statement said she never set her brush aside and kept working on “forever love and eternal soul.” The companies pledged to carry her work forward and, through art, “bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world.”
Kusama’s practice ran across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, fiction and poetry. The motifs never really changed. Dots, nets, pumpkins and mirrored infinity were the same images she described seeing as a child in Matsumoto, scaled up until they filled rooms and, for a time, the public imagination.
