Yayoi Kusama (97), a Japanese installation artist regarded as a master of contemporary art, died on the 14th of multiple organ failure. Kusama's side announced the death on the 27th on the official website, noting that "she did not put down her brush until just before her last breath."
Kusama made her name worldwide with works that fill the canvas densely with polka dots and nets. Her "Infinity Mirror Room" series, which lets visitors enter a room lined with mirrors and hung with lights to experience an endlessly extending space, is especially well known. Her pumpkin sculptures covered with countless black dots on a yellow background are also famous in Korea and are considered signature works.
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, and from childhood suffered hallucinations in which her field of vision was covered with patterns. Yayoi's parents were horticultural farmers who grew flowers and vegetables. Drawing flowers, trees, and stones every day, she thought the world around her was made up of an infinite array of dots. U.S. public radio NPR reported that in her childhood Kusama drew these hallucinations in a notebook to manage her fear.
Kusama's mother tried to stop her daughter from painting. But Kusama held her first solo exhibition in Matsumoto in 1952 and, in 1957 at age 28, moved to New York. In New York she presented her "Infinity Net" series, in which a net pattern is repeated across the canvas many times. Critics said the series at the time reflected a deep exploration of themes of death, self-erasure, and a yearning for transcendence.
In the late 1960s, when hippie culture was spreading, she took to the streets and continued her activities. Kusama carried out avant-garde performances painting polka dots on the bodies of people opposing the Vietnam War. She also circulated a letter proposing a peace plan to then U.S. President Richard Nixon.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973. Japanese media reported that from the 1970s she voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital and mainly lived there, continuing her work by going back and forth only to a studio across the street. During this period she expanded her practice beyond painting to writing novels.
International critical acclaim for Kusama began to spread gradually in the 1990s. In 1993, Kusama was selected as the artist representing the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Starting in 1998, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York invited her for retrospectives.
From 2011, she cemented her global stature with retrospectives at major museums in four Western countries, including Tate Modern in London. Yomiuri Shimbun reported on the 27th that this touring exhibition sparked a global "Kusama boom." Even in Latin America on the opposite side of Japan, more than 2 million people visited her first retrospective in 2013. More recently, about 520,000 people attended her 2017 solo exhibition at the National Art Center, Roppongi, Tokyo, showcasing undiminished popularity.
The Japanese government successively awarded Kusama the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts in 2000, recognition as a Person of Cultural Merit in 2009, and the Order of Culture in 2016. In 2017, to serve people around the world seeking her work, she opened the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Kusama also boasts considerable popularity in Korea's art market. In November 2021, a pumpkin painting by Kusama sold for 5.45 billion won at a domestic auction, setting a then-record high in Korea. At a Seoul Auction sale on Mar. 31 this year, her 2015 work "Pumpkin (MBOK)" exceeded its opening price of 9.5 billion won and was hammered at 10.45 billion won. The piece is a painting with a black background and yellow dots on a 160-centimeter-wide by 130-centimeter-high canvas.
In her lifetime, Kusama described herself as a single dot in the universe. She said, "Earth is just one polka dot among the millions of stars in the universe." The official Kusama website wrote on the 27th that she "lived her 97 years exploring eternal love and the soul."