10 things to know about Yayoi Kusama

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama was the youngest of four children in a wealthy family. When she was a child, her mother made her spy on her father, who had repeated affairs. Her mother also told her she was not allowed to paint and frequently confiscated her inks and canvases, which might explain her obsessive creative drive.

Kusama began making art as a young child in the 1930s, using drawing and painting as a way to process and cope with hallucinations and psychological distress, which would later become central themes in her distinctive and influential artistic style.

As a young, aspiring artist, Kusama greatly admired Georgia O’Keeffe, and even wrote to her to ask for advice. ‘I’m only on the first step of the long difficult life of being a painter. Will you kindly show me the way?’ she asked. O’Keeffe wrote back, warning that ‘in this country an artist has a hard time making a living.’ She nevertheless advised Kusama to come to America and show her work to as many people as she could.

In her mid-twenties, Kusama did just that. Reacting against what she regarded as her parents’ old-fashioned customs and morals, she decided to seek freedom and fame abroad. She moved to New York, where she lived between 1958 and 1975. ‘America is really the country that raised me,’ Kusama has said.

She describes her work as ‘art medicine’. The ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, which first won her critical acclaim in New York, originate from visual hallucinations that she claims have haunted her since childhood.

She first referenced the hallucinatory episodes as early as 1963, in an interview with the art critic Gordon Brown for WABC radio. ‘My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them,’ she said. ‘They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe’. In 1977, she voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric asylum in Tokyo where she continued to live.

Donald Judd worked as an art critic before becoming a leading light in the Minimalist movement. ‘The effect is both complex and simple,’ he wrote of Kusama’s paintings in Art News in 1959. The ‘Infinity Net’ paintings would fetch around $200 a piece at that time; now they can sell for millions.

Kusama is now among the highest-selling female artists, and the ‘Infinity Net’ paintings are her most sought-after pieces. In recent years, her global museum shows have consistently drawn crowds and long lines, with some institutions declaring their highest visitor numbers following an opening of her work.

Throughout her life, Kusama’s work has been exhibited alongside leading artists including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol  (who she considered a good friend, but later accused of stealing her ideas). Recent institutional shows include ‘Kusama: Cosmic Nature’ at the New York Botanical Garden in 2021, ‘Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2023-2024, and ‘Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms’ at Tate Modern in London from 2021-2024. Showcasing seven decades of her work, her travelling retrospective ‘Yayoi Kusama’ opened at Fondation Beyeler in 2025-2026, before heading to Museum Ludwig in Cologne this year. It will open at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in September 2026.

The artist never set out to belong to a movement, always describing her style ‘Kusama art’, despite her connections to major avant-garde artists. She would not let the art world forget her Japanese origins, either, always wearing a kimono to the private views of her shows.

The meeting took place in 1962 at Joseph Cornell’s home in Queens, New York. It would mark the start of an intense relationship with the reclusive artist, which lasted for over 10 years. Kusama’s relationship with Cornell — her only known romantic relationship — was erotic but sexless. Ultimately, it was the involvement of Cornell’s jealous mother — who once poured a bucket of water over the couple after discovering them kissing — that brought the relationship to an end. ‘I have lost count of the times I thought about giving that fat old woman a good swift kick,’ Kusama wrote in her 2002 autobiography, Infinity Net.

As a child she rebelliously decorated her clothes with dots. When she launched her own fashion company in the 1960s, clothes featured not dots but holes, strategically placed for the breasts or buttocks.

In the 1970s she made ‘orgy’ garments — to be worn by several people at once. Such outré outfits did not make it into the lines on which she collaborated with Louis Vuitton in 2023 — the most extensive artist collaboration the fashion house has ever commissioned, consisting of some 450 items. In her later years, Kusama has rarely been seen without her trademark red wig and dotty clothing.

Famously outspoken and candid, in 2002, she published Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama in Japanese, with the English version following in 2012. In it, she writes:

‘What I think about first and foremost is that I want to create good art. That is my sole desire. It would be futile and meaningless to focus on the shrinking time-frame before me, or to think of my limitations. I shall never stop striving to create works that will shine on after my death. There are nights when I cannot sleep simply because my heart is bursting with the aspiration to make art that will last forever. I feel how truly wonderful life is, and I tremble with undying fascination for the world of art, the only place that gives me hope and makes life worthwhile. And no matter how I may suffer for my art, I will have no regrets. This is the way I have lived my life, and it is the way I shall go on living.’

Kusama often describes how she craved fame when she arrived in New York. As a woman forging a career in a foreign country which harboured post-war resentment towards the Japanese, she had to show determination to get the attention she craved. At the 1966 Venice Biennale she resorted to handing out flyers featuring Sir Herbert Read’s poetic description of her work as ‘images of strange beauty’ that ‘press… on our organs of perception with terrifying insistence’.