Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (yah-YOY koo-SAH-mah) is a Japanese artist born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan. She works with sculpture, painting, and large installations (rooms you can actually walk inside)!

Her signature style uses repeating polka dots, bright colors, and patterns that spread across every surface. She calls this "infinity nets" because her patterns seem to go on without end.

Today she is recognized as one of the most successful living artists in the world. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms are visited by millions of people every year, and her spotted pumpkin sculptures are recognized worldwide.

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生) was born March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan. She is a contemporary artist working across sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, and fiction. It is one of the most wide-ranging creative careers in modern art history.

Her work draws from conceptual art, pop art, minimalism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. It is deeply personal: Kusama has spoken openly about experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations from childhood, and she uses art as a form of therapy and self-expression, a practice she calls "art medicine."

Kusama lives and works in Tokyo, Japan, where she voluntarily resides in a psychiatric institution and walks to her nearby studio every day to create new work, a routine she has maintained for decades.

Her Obliteration Room is one of the most interactive artworks ever made. A plain white room is set up with all white furniture. Then visitors are handed sheets of colorful dot stickers and invited to place them anywhere they like. Over weeks or months, the room transforms into a riot of color, created by thousands of different people working together!

Her pumpkin sculptures are inspired by the vegetable gardens near where she grew up as a child. She has said pumpkins are "comical and charming," and she has covered them with her signature polka dots in yellow and black.

The Obliteration Room — slowly covered in dots by visitors

Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees — outdoor installation, Inhotim

Kusama's body of work spans over seven decades and defies easy categorization. Several major series define her legacy:

The Obliteration Room — a white domestic space gradually obliterated by visitors' colored dot stickers

The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens (2015)

Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees — outdoor installation, Inhotim, Brazil

Growing up in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s was not easy. Yayoi's family was not always supportive of her dreams of becoming an artist; her mother sometimes tore up her drawings! But Yayoi refused to stop creating.

In 1958, she moved to New York City, which was one of the most exciting art cities in the world. She worked hard and showed her art in galleries, but as a Japanese woman, she often found it difficult to get the same attention as male artists around her.

Today, she is one of the most celebrated artists alive. Museums around the world hold major collections of her work, and her exhibitions draw record-breaking crowds wherever they travel.

The Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, which opened in 2017

Kusama's path to recognition was long and shaped by barriers that many women and non-Western artists of her generation faced. She grew up in Matsumoto, Japan, where she began drawing obsessively as a child to process the vivid hallucinations she experienced. After studying in Kyoto, she moved to New York City in 1957 with little money and limited English, determined to make her mark on the art world.

Through the 1960s she created work that was genuinely ahead of its time, building her Infinity Mirror Rooms, organizing public performance events, and developing the ideas around repetition and pattern that would define her legacy. She worked alongside artists like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg and influenced their thinking, yet she consistently received less credit and far less commercial success. By 1973 she had returned to Japan, exhausted, and chose to live in a psychiatric facility in Tokyo, where she has remained ever since, walking to her nearby studio each morning to create.

The turnaround came gradually. Representing Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale brought renewed international attention, and over the following decades the art world caught up with what she had been doing all along. Today her retrospectives fill museums from Tate Modern to the Whitney, and at 96 she is regarded as one of the most important artists of the past hundred years.

Kusama installation at the Singapore Biennale, 2006

The Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo (opened 2017)

Step inside one of Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms and see how her art makes space feel endless.

An introduction to Kusama's work. 1:37

Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Excerpts from Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots (dir. Heather Lenz) — Kusama, gallerist Richard Castellone, and Tate Curator Frances Morris discuss her childhood, her move to New York, and the themes of infinity in her work. 15 min.

• Why do you think Kusama uses dots and repeating patterns in almost all her artwork? What might that say about her ideas?
• The Obliteration Room is made by everyone together. What does that tell us about how art can be a community activity?
• Kusama moved to a country far from home to follow her dream. What would that feel like? Would you do it?
• What makes Kusama's work feel different from other art you've seen?

• Kusama's Wikipedia biography says her work influenced Andy Warhol, yet Warhol is often more famous. What does this tell us about how history records credit for creative ideas?
• How does knowing that Kusama uses art as "therapy" change how you understand her work? Does personal experience belong in art?
• The theme of "infinity" appears throughout her career. What might infinity represent for someone who grew up experiencing intense visual patterns? What might it represent for viewers?
• Kusama's late-career success came decades after her most innovative early work. What factors, beyond talent, determine when and whether an artist gets recognized?