Yayoi Kusama Created Fantastical 'Infinity Mirror Rooms' That Became the Art World's Most Famous Backdrops. Her Work Spanned Counterculture to the Cosmos

No artist is more closely associated with the concept of infinity than Yayoi Kusama. For her famous “infinity mirror rooms,” she presented whimsical objects in a space with reflective surfaces on the floor and walls. There, she absorbed the public in magical, never-ending worlds.

In the spring of 2017, the career-spanning exhibition “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” smashed attendance records at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. On Thursday, Kusama’s representatives announced that she had died at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, at age 97. Though she first came to prominence in Japan in the 1950s, Kusama traced her fascination with polka dots and other repetitive imagery back to 1939, when she was 10 years old.

She began drawing and painting as a child as a means of asserting control over the terrifying hallucinations she suffered. But the repetitive forms she created as a bulwark against terrors that only she could see would eventually become a globally recognizable visual language. And Kusama would go on to be one of the world’s most popular creatives: In 2014, her 1960 painting White No. 28 commanded $7.1 million at auction, setting a record (since broken) for the highest price ever paid for a work by a living woman artist.

Kusama had a wild 1960s, then a more obscure 1970s, and later enjoyed a favorable reappraisal when “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” the first show to survey the entirety of her career up to that point, opened at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York City in September 1989. Four years later, when the artist represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, it felt like a coronation—the beginning of a multidecade final act in which she would be embraced as a global icon. She turned the interior of Japan’s pavilion into a mirrored landscape of glowing yellow polka-dotted pumpkins, an expression of one of the motifs for which she’d become well known.

She worked in a dizzying number of mediums, including prose fiction and playwriting. That means that she’s been kind of unswayed by trends in the art market or the art world.” Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, about 130 miles northwest of Tokyo, Kusama spent part of her youth in a factory sewing parachutes for the Japanese military during World War II. Even as a child, hallucinations haunted her, images seeming to arrange themselves into endless patterns, a void of repetition that she feared would swallow her up.

Replicating these patterns in pen and brush became her only defense. Sometimes her mother would snatch the paper from her hands as she worked. Kusama’s mother also ordered her to follow her philandering father and spy on him as he conducted his extramarital affairs—an experience that would leave the artist with a lifelong aversion to sex.