Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama, known worldwide as the “polka dot queen” for her hypnotic patterns and immersive installations, has died at the age of 97. Her studio announced that Kusama died at a Tokyo hospital on August 14, 2026.
The statement read, “Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry. She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul.”
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929. She became a pioneering figure in modern art through painting, sculpture, performance, writing and installation work. Her bright red bob, psychedelic colours and repeated dot patterns made her instantly identifiable.
But behind the global fame was a complicated journey shaped by rejection, mental health struggles and decades of artistic persistence.
A child artist in Japan
{{/usCountry}}A child artist in Japan
{{/usCountry}}Kusama had a miserable upbringing due to her father's infidelity and harsh abusive mother.
Despite her mother's repeated attempts to dissuade her, Kusama would sit and sketch the flowers as her wealthy family ran plant nurseries. Kusama started having hallucinations when she was younger, in which the flowers would swarm around and converse with her. She used art as a coping strategy.
Kusama, then 13 years old, was drafted into the Japanese army during World War II to make parachute cloth. Later, she studied nihonga, a traditional Japanese painting technique, in Kyoto. But she was utterly dissatisfied with its shortcomings. In 1958, Kusama left Japan for New York, rejecting the prospect of an arranged marriage and kids.
Who was Yayoi Kusama and why was she controversial?
Kusama first gained international attention after moving to New York in 1958. She entered the city’s experimental art scene and was soon involved Pop art and avant-garde movements. During the 1960s, she staged performance pieces known as “happenings” that often carried political messages.
One of the most discussed chapters of her career was her anti-war activism. During the Vietnam War era, Kusama organised protests against military conflict and used her art as a form of political expression. She also famously wrote to then-US President Richard Nixon and offered a provocative proposal to end the war.
Her performances, which sometimes also included naked participants painted with her signature dots and she surprised the audience. Conservative sections of society criticized her work, while supporters viewed it as a challenge to authority, capitalism and traditional ideas about the human body.
In the late 1970s, Kusama voluntarily moved into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she continued creating art from a nearby studio. Her mental health struggles became a central part of discussions about her life, but Kusama consistently presented art as a way to survive and communicate.