Yayoi Kusama, the artist who turned infinity into polka dots, died in a Tokyo hospital on August 14 at the age of 97.
As a child, Kusama saw flowers start to speak and patterns spread across everything she looked at. Drawing became her way of putting a boundary around these visions, a way to keep them from swallowing her whole.
In 1957, after writing to Georgia O'Keeffe, she moved to the United States, first to Seattle, then to New York. There she developed her Infinity Nets, canvases covered in repeated arcs in which she dissolved her own self. In 1965 she created one of the first immersive installations in art history, Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli's Field. Despite this, she received far less recognition in her lifetime than contemporaries like Warhol and Oldenburg.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, largely unnoticed. In 1977 she voluntarily moved into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she lived for the rest of her life, commuting daily to a studio nearby to keep working, a routine she kept up for nearly five decades. In one interview she said: "Drawing and making art is what kept me from ending my life."
Recognition returned in the late 1980s. In 1993 Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, retrospectives around the world followed, and in 2017 her own museum opened in Tokyo. Her mirrored rooms filled with polka-dotted pumpkins became one of the most recognizable sights in contemporary art. She kept painting almost until her final days.
