Yayoi Kusama with her work, “Love Is Calling,” at the David Zwirner gallery in New York in 2013. Photo by Will Ragozzino, via David Zwirner, New York.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began drawing as a child, often describing visions of fields of dots and patterns that seemed to engulf the world around her. Her family opposed her ambitions to become an artist, but she persisted. In 1957 she moved to New York, arriving with a modest supply of paintings and an enormous determination to be noticed.
There she produced her celebrated “Infinity Net” paintings, covering canvases with thousands of tiny, painstakingly repeated marks. She also made soft sculptures, experimental installations and provocative performances. During the 1960s she became part of New York’s avant-garde, organizing nude happenings and antiwar events and challenging the conventions of both art and society. Her work intersected with the emerging worlds of Pop, Minimalism and performance art, although she often received less credit than male artists working around her.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, after years of intense activity and worsening health. She had been hospitalized several times for panic attacks and hallucinations, and in 1975 entered Tokyo’s Seiwa Hospital. In 1977 she chose to become a permanent resident there.
Her life inside the psychiatric hospital has become one of the more unusual chapters in modern art history—but it is important not to mistake it for retirement. Kusama established a studio just a few minutes from the hospital and maintained an extraordinarily disciplined working routine. In other words, her address was a psychiatric institution, but her workplace was an art studio. She continued producing paintings, sculptures and writing, sometimes working from her hospital room as well.
A few facts about this unconventional arrangement are especially striking. Kusama lived there by choice rather than being simply confined there. A psychiatrist had suggested art as part of her treatment, and Kusama embraced the idea with characteristic intensity. She also became a prolific writer, publishing novels, poetry and autobiographical fiction alongside her visual work. Her first novel, Manhattan Suicide Addict, appeared in 1978, only a year after she became a permanent resident.
For decades, Kusama was better known in Japan as an eccentric, marginalized figure than as the global art star she would become. That changed dramatically from the late 1980s onward. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms, with their seemingly limitless reflections and constellations of lights, transformed galleries into theatrical environments. Her spotted pumpkins became another signature image, simultaneously whimsical and uncanny.
In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo, giving her a permanent institutional home of her own. Her popularity eventually reached far beyond the traditional art world, with major museum exhibitions and a widely publicized collaboration with Louis Vuitton.
Kusama’s achievement was to turn repetition into revelation. The dots that once threatened to overwhelm her became a language through which she could overwhelm the viewer. Her hospital room, studio and galleries were all variations on the same idea: that art could impose order on infinity.
For Kusama, making art was not merely a career. It was a way of continuing to exist.
