The polka dots won’t stop: Yayoi Kusama dies at 97, never putting down her paintbrush until the very end

A red wig, all-over polka dots, and a yellow pumpkin: with just these three elements, almost everyone around the world knows it’s Yayoi Kusama.

On August 27, the Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Memorial Art Foundation officially announced that Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama died at a Tokyo hospital on August 14 at the age of 97. Kyodo News reported that the cause of death was multiple organ failure.

Rather than letting 97 mark the end of her long life, perhaps one line in the official statement feels more like Yayoi Kusama: she never put down her paintbrush until the end of her life.

From Japan in the 1950s and New York’s most radical avant-garde art circles to the now almost universally recognizable pumpkins, Infinity Mirror Rooms, and all-over polka dots, she spent more than 70 years returning to the same question: If a pattern keeps extending and multiplying, will the human body, space, and even the self eventually disappear into “infinity” too?

Polka dots aren’t decoration. They’re how she saw the world.

images from/yayoi kusama mjuseum

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. From childhood, she experienced visual and auditory hallucinations: flowers, net-like patterns, and polka dots before her eyes would continually multiply, even seeming to swallow her body and the space around her.

Rather than trying to remove these images from her life entirely, she began painting them. Her polka dots and nets were not logos later designed to establish a personal style, but a visual language present in her work from the very beginning.

In the 1950s, she gradually developed her now-famous “Infinity Nets.” Tiny arcs and grids cover vast canvases, with no clear center or true beginning or end. Repetition itself became her creative method, gradually extending into what Kusama called “Self-Obliteration,” or the dissolution of the self.

When polka dots cover people, furniture, walls, and even entire rooms, the clear boundaries of the individual begin to disappear. For Kusama, “infinity” was never simply a beautiful effect, but a question of how she existed in the world.

From the streets of New York to Venice, she was always ahead of her time.

images from/yayoi kusama mjuseum

Kusama went to the United States in 1957 and entered the New York art scene the following year. Abstract Expressionism was at its peak, yet rather than following the mainstream, she continued developing her Infinity Nets, soft sculptures, and immersive spaces made with mirrors and lights.

By the 1960s, her work had moved beyond the gallery. Body painting, fashion shows, anti-war happenings, nude performances, and experimental films followed in succession. Art was no longer simply a painting on a wall; it could happen directly on the body, in the streets, and in public spaces.

In 1966, she went to the Venice Biennale without an official invitation and arranged about 1,500 mirrored balls beside the venue, creating the guerrilla-style work “Narcissus Garden.” The mirrored spheres continually reflected viewers, the sky, and the surrounding landscape, carrying forward her idea of letting the “self” disappear through repetition and reflection.

A symbolic turning point came in 1993. Twenty-seven years later, she officially returned to the Venice Biennale as Japan’s representative at the Japan Pavilion, exhibiting works from her early Infinity Nets and soft sculptures to “Mirror Room (Pumpkin).” It was also an important moment in the international art world’s reassessment of her work.

That yellow pumpkin, which later became a household image, gradually joined polka dots and mirrored spaces as one of Kusama’s most recognizable symbols.

After the pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms, she kept painting until the end.

images from/yayoi kusama mjuseum

After returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama continued painting and creating large-scale installations while also writing novels and poetry prolifically. Her artistic world did not shrink with age; instead, it kept extending from canvases to entire rooms, public sculptures, and even cities.

In 2009, she began the large-scale painting series “My Eternal Soul,” completing around 900 works by 2021. That same year, she began a new series, “EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE.” Even after turning 90, new polka dots, eyes, cells, and abstract figures continued to emerge on her canvases.

She also received major recognition in Japan and from the international art world: she was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 2009, awarded Japan’s Order of Culture in 2016, and opened the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 2017.

On the very day she died, August 14, the official store was still posting details about the museum’s next exhibition, themed around “light.” The following day, it announced a major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam spanning roughly 70 years of her career.

In its obituary, the Yayoi Kusama Museum said that she devoted her life to art, performance, novels, and poetry; she never put down her paintbrush until the end of her life and always believed that “love can save the world.” “KUSAMA’s POP,” now on view in Tokyo, will not close early following her death and will remain open as scheduled through August 30.

Kusama spent a lifetime painting “infinity,” and now the works she left behind seem to be fulfilling that idea. The artist herself has gone, yet the polka dots continue to multiply, the spaces in her mirrors still have no visible end, and those pumpkins remain scattered around the world.

She has put down her paintbrush, but the “infinity” Yayoi Kusama created may only now be beginning to continue.

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