In 2023, a single exhibition by a 94-year-old Japanese artist drew longer lines than any museum show in recent memory. Visitors waited for hours — sometimes in the rain — for a chance to step inside a small, mirrored room filled with dangling LED lights that seemed to extend infinitely in every direction. For sixty seconds (the typical time limit), they stood inside what felt like the cosmos itself, surrounded by their own reflection multiplied into infinity. The artist was Yayoi Kusama, and those Infinity Mirror Rooms have made her the most popular living artist on the planet.
But Kusama is far more than the Instagram-friendly spectacle her rooms have become. Over a career spanning seven decades, she has produced an astonishing body of work — paintings, sculptures, installations, films, novels, poetry, and fashion — driven by a compulsive creative vision rooted in childhood hallucinations. She has been a pioneering figure in Pop Art, Minimalism, feminist art, and environmental art, often years ahead of male peers who received more credit. She has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since 1977, walking to her studio across the street every morning to work. Her story is one of relentless creative obsession triumphing over mental illness, sexism, and cultural marginalization.
This article explores Kusama's life, her major works, and why her art connects so powerfully with millions of people worldwide.
Early Life and the Origins of Obsession
Yayoi Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, a city in the mountainous Nagano prefecture of Japan. Her family ran a prosperous plant nursery and seed farm, and as a child she spent long hours among the flowers and fields that would later populate her art. But her childhood was far from idyllic. Her parents' marriage was unhappy — her father was frequently unfaithful, and her mother, embittered by his behavior, was often abusive toward young Yayoi.
More significantly, Kusama began experiencing vivid hallucinations as a young child. She described seeing fields of flowers that spoke to her, patterns of dots that spread across every surface and threatened to engulf her, and nets that expanded infinitely until they consumed the entire visual field. Rather than being terrifying (though they sometimes were), these visions became the foundation of her art. "One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table," she later recalled, "and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body, and the universe."
Yayoi Kusama, "Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees" (2006), installation at the Singapore Biennale. Kusama's signature polka dots transform the natural environment, blurring the boundary between art and reality. Photo by Siyang Ng. Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Despite her family's opposition — her mother tore up her drawings — Kusama studied traditional Japanese painting (Nihonga) at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. But she found the conservative art scene in Japan stifling and set her sights on the only place that seemed big enough for her ambitions: New York City.
The New York Years (1958–1973)
Kusama arrived in New York in 1958 with little money but enormous determination. She quickly immersed herself in the city's avant-garde art scene, befriending artists like Donald Judd (who became her romantic partner), Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol.
Infinity Net Paintings
Her first major works in New York were the Infinity Net paintings — enormous canvases covered in thousands of tiny, hand-painted loops or arcs that extended to every edge with no focal point and no composition in the traditional sense. These monochrome paintings, some over thirty feet long, anticipated Minimalism by several years. They were directly inspired by her hallucinations — the infinite nets she saw spreading across her visual field — and the obsessive, repetitive process of painting them was itself a form of psychological self-treatment.
Accumulation Sculptures and Soft Sculpture
By the early 1960s, Kusama began creating Accumulation sculptures — furniture and objects covered in hundreds of stuffed fabric protrusions that resemble phalluses. An armchair bristling with soft white tubes, a rowing boat overflowing with them, a pair of shoes sprouting them — these unsettling works addressed sexuality, obsession, and the erasure of the individual object under a mass of repetitive forms. They were among the earliest examples of soft sculpture, predating Claes Oldenburg's more famous soft objects.
Infinity Mirror Rooms
In 1965, Kusama created her first Infinity Mirror Room, "Phalli's Field" — a room lined with mirrors and filled with hundreds of her stuffed fabric protrusions, creating an infinite multiplication of forms that overwhelmed the viewer's sense of space and self. This was the beginning of the immersive environments that would eventually make her world-famous. The mirrors transformed a finite room into a seemingly infinite space, externalizing Kusama's hallucinatory experience of boundless pattern and self-dissolution.
Happenings and Body Festivals
In the late 1960s, Kusama organized public "happenings" — performance events where she painted polka dots on naked participants' bodies in public spaces, including Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge. These events were equal parts art, protest, and spectacle. They challenged social norms around nudity, critiqued the Vietnam War, and expressed Kusama's philosophy of "self-obliteration" — the dissolution of the individual ego into the infinite pattern of the cosmos.
Return to Japan and Reinvention
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, physically and emotionally exhausted. In 1977, she voluntarily admitted herself to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, where she has lived ever since. Far from retiring, she established a studio near the hospital and began one of the most productive phases of her career.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kusama produced large-scale paintings, sculptures, and environmental installations while also writing surrealist novels and poetry. Her reputation, which had faded in the 1970s, was revived by a major retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York in 1989 and her representation of Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993, where her mirror room "Mirror Room (Pumpkin)" drew enormous attention.
Yayoi Kusama, yellow pumpkin sculpture on Naoshima island, Japan. The pumpkin is one of Kusama's most beloved motifs, representing both humility and cosmic wonder. Photo by Vassil. Image: CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Key Themes in Kusama's Art
Infinity and Self-Obliteration
The central concept in Kusama's work is the dissolution of boundaries — between self and other, object and environment, finite and infinite. Her polka dots, nets, and mirror rooms all serve this theme. "A polka dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life," she has said, "and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka dots become movement. Polka dots are a way to infinity."
Obsession and Repetition
Kusama's compulsive repetition of dots, nets, and accumulations is both a symptom of her mental condition and a deliberate artistic strategy. The act of painting thousands of identical marks is meditative and therapeutic — it quiets the hallucinations by giving them form. It is also conceptually powerful: through infinite repetition, individual marks lose their identity and merge into a larger pattern, just as individual humans dissolve into the vastness of the universe.
The Cosmic and the Personal
Kusama's work oscillates between the intimate and the cosmic. A polka dot is a simple, childlike form. An Infinity Room evokes the endless expanse of space. Her pumpkins — a favorite motif — are humble vegetables that she transforms into objects of wonder. This tension between the ordinary and the transcendent gives her art its emotional power and wide appeal.
Why Kusama Matters
Kusama's significance extends across multiple dimensions of art history:
Pioneer of immersive art — Her Infinity Mirror Rooms, created from the 1960s onward, are precursors to today's immersive art experiences. Every immersive installation, from teamLab's digital environments to Meow Wolf's experiential spaces, owes something to Kusama's vision of art as total environment.
Bridge between movements — Kusama's work connects Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and conceptual art. She was doing "soft sculpture" before Oldenburg, "accumulations" before Warhol's multiples, and "environments" before the term was widely used.
Feminist icon — As a Japanese woman in the male-dominated New York art world of the 1960s, Kusama fought against double marginalization. Her body-painting happenings, which foregrounded the female body on her own terms, were ahead of the feminist art movement by several years.
Art and mental health — Kusama's openness about her mental illness, and her demonstration that extraordinary creativity can coexist with psychological struggle, has been inspiring for millions. Her work shows that art can communicate experiences that words cannot capture.
Where to Experience Kusama's Work
Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms are in permanent collections at several major museums:
The Broad, Los Angeles — "Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away"
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. — Multiple Kusama rooms in rotation
Tate Modern, London — Major Kusama holdings
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne — "Flower Obsession" and other works
Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo — A dedicated museum near her studio, open by reservation only
If you plan to visit, check our museum visit guide for practical strategies, especially for popular exhibitions with timed entry.
Final Thoughts
Yayoi Kusama has spent over seventy years transforming her private hallucinations into public wonder. Her polka dots, infinity rooms, and pumpkin sculptures have become some of the most recognizable images in contemporary art — not through marketing or provocation, but through the sheer intensity and consistency of her vision. She reminds us that great art often comes from the most unexpected places: a seed farm in the Japanese mountains, a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, the inside of a mind that sees the universe as an infinite field of dots.
Her popularity with young audiences — the endless Instagram posts from inside her mirror rooms — is sometimes dismissed as superficial. But Kusama herself would disagree. She wants people to experience self-obliteration, to feel their individual boundaries dissolve into something larger. If a sixty-second visit to an Infinity Room gives someone even a momentary sense of cosmic connection, her art has done its work.
Want to learn about other artists who challenged convention? Read about Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, or explore how street art redefined where art belongs. The most powerful artists are often those who refuse to stay inside the lines the art world draws for them.
