Japan’s ‘queen of polka dots’ Yayoi Kusama dies aged 97

Yayoi Kusama, the zany Japanese artist known for her polka-dot-covered pumpkins and mirrored infinity room illusions, has died. She was 97.

The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation announced her death on Thursday.

She died on August 14 at a Tokyo hospital. The statement did not specify a cause, but Japanese broadcaster NHK reported it was organ failure.

‘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,’ the foundation said.

‘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, northwest of Tokyo, in 1929. Japan was deeply conservative in the post-war era and her insistence on becoming an artist shocked her parents.

Despite her family’s pleas not to, she trained in Nihonga, literally ‘Japanese paintings’, a style associated with conservative nationalism.

Her work, however, soon became anything but conservative.

If you’ve ever scrolled Instagram, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a work by Kusama, known to many as the ‘polka dot queen’.

Giant yellow pumpkins covered in black spots. Paintings made of nothing but tiny curving lines. Selfies taken in endlessly reflective mirrored rooms filled with equally endless pumpkins.

And, more often than not, you’d have just 45 seconds or so to take that selfie – queues to see her installations often stretched for hours.

This was all part of what Kusama happily called ‘Kusamania’, which reached such highs that countless tourists fly to Naoshima, an island almost entirely devoted to her works, every year.

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Her artwork also included phalluses – and a lot of them – sewing thousands of stuffed fabric ones and glueing them to furniture to create installations.

She also painted polka dots on completely nude people as part of anti-Vietnam War happenings throughout New York City in the late 1960s.

After writing poems and books, she admitted herself to the Seiwa mental hospital in Tokyo in 1977, where she stayed until her death.

She said that the comfort and security of the hospital let her breathe for the first time in years, building a small studio nearby.

Kusama’s polka dots were splashed in recent years on shopping centre installations, notebooks, clothing, beauty products and cars.

Beyond the likes and product deals was her art. Kusama once described the Earth, the moon and the sun as dots, with humans merely ‘tiny dots in the world’ and her art as a way to unite them.

She was all too aware of how people viewed her dotty paintings and sculptures, even if all they wanted was a selfie.

‘Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse,’ she wrote in her 2002 autobiography, Infinity Net, referring to her work in the 1950s and 60s.

‘Bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot.’

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