Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama dies at 97

Around the age of 10, Yayoi Kusama began experiencing hallucinations, seeing dots and net patterns enveloping everything in her mind's eye. She attributed these early visions to the psychological strain of growing up with an unloving mother, who forbade her from painting and tried to impose traditional expectations on her behavior. Although she continued to experience hallucinations until late in life, Kusama learned to live with them and channel them into her art. "My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease," Kusama once told US arts publication Bomb Magazine.

After attending the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, Kusama held her first exhibitions in her hometown of Matsumoto. She was unusually open about her mental health at a time when such topics were heavily stigmatized.

"It was extraordinary that she addressed it so openly," said Stephan Diederich, curator of the Kusama retrospective at Cologne's Museum Ludwig which took place in 2026.

"For her, art was a survival strategy and a form of therapy, which she always made clear without making it the main focus," Diederich told DW.

For Kusama, who was born on March 22, 1929, life in Japan soon became too stifling.

"[My parents] were always trying to rope me into arranged marriages with men I'd never met who came from very particular families," Yayoi once told writer Andrew Solomon, referring to her early 20s as "my era of mental breakdown." She increasingly felt like "a prisoner surrounded by a curtain of depersonalization."

Finally, she broke free from the conventions and expectations of postwar Japan and moved to New York in 1958. "She was exceptionally self-confident and determined to go her own way and pursue a career," said Diederich. Kusama's mother provided her with financial support to get started , on the condition that she never return to Japan. Fellow artist Georgia O'Keeffe, to whom Kusama had previously sent a selection of her works, helped her gain a foothold in the United States.

Kusama often spent entire days working and produced a vast body of art. She became part of the New York avant-garde scene, where her meticulous "Infinity Net" paintings drew attention for their hypnotic, repetitive patterns.

Her works, including soft, often phallic fabric sculptures, paralleled some of the approaches of contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

"She was very confident in saying that she set the benchmarks that her male colleagues later drew on," explained Diederich. However, he added, it's impossible to determine definitively who was first. In any case, her male fellow artists were more commercially successful than the young Asian woman, contributing to her attempted suicide, which she fortunately survived. Kusama made a statement about the gender pay gap with her sculpture "Traveling Life" (1964), which features a ladder covered in phallic shapes with women's shoes on the steps.