TOKYO — Yayoi Kusama, the legendary Japanese avant-garde artist whose hypnotic polka dots, giant pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms transformed contemporary art and became global cultural phenomena, has died at the age of 97.
Kusama died at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, according to an official statement released Thursday, August 27, by the Yayoi Kusama Museum and Yayoi Kusama Foundation.
The Straits Times, citing the foundation, reported that the cause of death was multiple organ failure.
The news was initially reported internationally by Kyodo News and Reuters, triggering tributes to an artist whose career stretched across more than seven decades and whose unmistakable visual language made her one of Japan’s most internationally recognized cultural figures.
She reportedly kept painting until the end
Perhaps the most striking detail to emerge after Kusama’s death is that her creative work apparently never stopped.
Her museum and foundation said Kusama continued painting until her final days, remaining committed to the artistic practice that had dominated nearly her entire life.
The organizations said they intend to carry forward her artistic vision and her belief in using art to bring hope and strength to people around the world.
That final chapter fits a career defined by extraordinary persistence.
Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, in 1929, Kusama began experiencing vivid hallucinations when she was young. Repeated images of dots, flowers and patterns would later become fundamental elements of her work.
Rather than attempting to escape those recurring visions, she transformed them into art.
From Japan to New York’s avant-garde scene
Kusama moved to New York in 1958, entering an art scene that was rapidly being reshaped by Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism.
There she developed her celebrated Infinity Net paintings, covering large canvases with repetitive patterns that seemed to extend beyond their physical boundaries.
Her work increasingly moved beyond conventional painting into sculpture, installation, performance and provocative public happenings.
In 1966, Kusama presented Narcissus Garden outside the official program of the Venice Biennale, arranging roughly 1,500 mirrored spheres into a reflective field and attempting to sell individual spheres to visitors.
The stunt embodied many of the themes that would follow her throughout her career: infinity, repetition, reflection, commercialization, identity and the disappearance—or “obliteration”—of the individual self.
The pumpkins and mirrors that conquered the world
Kusama eventually became instantly recognizable far beyond traditional art circles.
Her brightly colored pumpkin sculptures covered in polka dots became signature works, with perhaps the best-known example installed on Japan’s art island of Naoshima.
But it was her Infinity Mirror Rooms that introduced Kusama’s work to an enormous new generation.
Using mirrors, lights and repeating objects to create the illusion of endless space, the installations became major attractions at museums worldwide.
Long lines routinely formed for opportunities to spend only seconds inside the rooms, while photographs of the dazzling installations spread across social media.
The phenomenon turned an artist who had spent years outside the mainstream art establishment into one of contemporary art’s most recognizable global figures.
Decades living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital
Kusama returned permanently to Japan in the 1970s.
In 1977, she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she continued living while maintaining a nearby studio and working extensively on her paintings, sculptures, installations and writing.
Far from ending her career, the arrangement helped provide the structure from which she produced decades of additional work.
Kusama also wrote novels, poetry and an autobiography, extending her creative output well beyond visual art.
Recognition came late — then became enormous
Although Kusama had been active in the New York avant-garde during the 1950s and 1960s, widespread institutional recognition came much later.
A major turning point arrived when she represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale, presenting a mirrored environment filled with pumpkin sculptures.
Major museum exhibitions and retrospectives followed.
Her works eventually commanded multimillion-dollar prices, and her 1960 painting White No. 28 sold for $7.1 million in 2014, then a record auction price for a living female artist.
Yet Kusama’s impact cannot be measured solely through auction prices.
She helped blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, installation, performance, fashion and popular culture while turning deeply personal experiences into a visual vocabulary understood around the world.
Dots became galaxies.
Mirrors became infinity.
Pumpkins became monuments.
And experiences once rooted in private visions became immersive environments visited by millions.
Her work continues even after her death
Kusama’s death does not immediately close the doors on her artistic world.
The Yayoi Kusama Museum announced that its current exhibition, “KUSAMA’s POP,” will continue as scheduled through August 30, just weeks after the artist’s death in Tokyo.
It is a fitting final detail for an artist whose life and work were almost impossible to separate.
For more than seven decades, Kusama repeatedly returned to the same fundamental ideas—dots, repetition, infinity, love, mortality and the disappearance of the self.
At 97, according to the institution bearing her name, she was still painting.
Her brush may finally have stopped, but the universe she created appears destined to keep expanding.
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