Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist whose polka dot paintings and immersive infinity mirror rooms made her one of the most visited artists in the world, died on 14 August in a Tokyo hospital. She was 97. Her company, Yayoi Kusama Inc., confirmed the news in a statement, saying she had continued to paint until her final days, "never setting aside her brush." No cause of death was given.

Born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, in Japan's Nagano Prefecture, Kusama endured a traumatic childhood marked by a physically abusive mother, an unfaithful father, and hallucinations that began in early childhood — visions of flowers that would swarm and speak to her, of patterns expanding to engulf her entire world. Rather than suppress these experiences, she channelled them into art. "I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness," she once wrote of a formative vision. During the Second World War, she was conscripted at 13 to sew parachutes for Japanese soldiers. She later studied nihonga, a traditional Japanese painting style, in Kyoto, before rejecting both its constraints and the arranged marriage her family planned for her. In 1957 or 1958, she left for New York, where she immersed herself in the post-war American art scene, becoming associated with figures such as Donald Judd and reportedly influencing artists including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg — though Kusama maintained throughout her life that several of her ideas were appropriated by white male artists while she was written out of art history.

In New York, she produced her landmark "infinity net" paintings — vast, impastoed canvases covered in repeating dot and net motifs — and her "soft sculptures," furniture and everyday objects covered in fabric phallic forms she described as a means of confronting her deep-seated anxieties about sex. During the 1960s, she staged provocative happenings: body-painting festivals with naked performers covered in polka dots, what is said to be New York's first "homosexual wedding" in 1968, and anti-war demonstrations including a letter to President Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in exchange for ending the Vietnam War. At the 1966 Venice Biennale — which she entered without an official invitation — she installed Narcissus Garden, a reflective "lake" of 1,500 mirrored spheres, and began selling them for $2 each under the slogan "Your narcissism for sale," until the biennale shut her down. Her mental health deteriorated during this period, and she made suicide attempts before returning permanently to Japan in 1973. In 1977, she voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she would live for the rest of her life, making daily trips to her nearby studio. "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day," she said in 2012, "and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art."

After years of relative obscurity, a major retrospective in 1998 — which travelled from Los Angeles to the Museum of Modern Art in New York — marked the beginning of a remarkable late-career resurgence. Her infinity mirror rooms, in which coloured lights, pumpkins, and reflective surfaces create the illusion of endless space, became global phenomena in the social media age, drawing hours-long queues and record-breaking crowds. A 2024–25 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne attracted more than 570,000 ticketed visitors, making it the most successful ticketed exhibition in the gallery's history — outpacing shows dedicated to Van Gogh, Monet, and Picasso. A museum dedicated entirely to her work opened in Tokyo in 2017. She described her signature polka dots simply: "A polka dot has the shape of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world, and the moon, which is calm. Polka dots are a way to infinity."

Kusama's death closes one of modern art's most singular and unlikely careers — one spanning nearly eight decades, multiple continents, psychiatric institutions, and the Instagram era. She always resisted easy classification. "I cannot imagine how I will be classified after my death," she once said. "It feels good to be an outsider."