Yayoi Kusama, one of the most influential and internationally recognized artists of our time, passed away in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 at the age of 97.
The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation announced her passing on 27 August. In their official statement, they reflected on an extraordinary 97-year life devoted to artistic creation, noting that Kusama continued to paint until her final days and remained steadfast in her lifelong belief that love can save the world.
Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began making art at an early age. Recurring visions of dots, flowers and patterns that seemed to expand endlessly across her surroundings would later become fundamental to her artistic language. Through repetition and accumulation, she developed an intensely personal visual vocabulary that explored infinity, self-obliteration, the cosmos and the relationship between the individual and the universe.
Kusama moved to the United States in 1957 and soon established herself within New York’s avant-garde art scene. Her celebrated Infinity Nets, composed of endlessly repeated marks across the surface of the canvas, became an early expression of ideas that would occupy her throughout her career. During the 1960s, her practice expanded into sculpture, installation, performance, film and experimental happenings, placing her at the forefront of some of the most radical artistic developments of the period.
In 1965, Kusama created the first of what would become her iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, transforming repetition into an immersive spatial experience. A year later, she presented Narcissus Garden alongside the 1966 Venice Biennale, installing hundreds of mirrored spheres outdoors. In 1993, she returned to Venice as the official representative of Japan, marking an important moment in the international reassessment of her work.
Across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature and fashion, Kusama continually moved beyond conventional artistic boundaries. Her polka dots, pumpkins, Infinity Nets and Infinity Mirror Rooms became some of the most instantly recognizable images in contemporary art. Yet beneath their vivid colors and apparent playfulness lies a deeply personal artistic philosophy—one concerned with repetition, psychological experience, mortality, eternity and the dissolution of the self into an infinite universe.
Over the following decades, Kusama’s work was presented by major museums and institutions around the world, reaching audiences far beyond the traditional boundaries of contemporary art. In 2016, she received Japan’s prestigious Order of Culture, and in 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo, dedicated to preserving and presenting her extraordinary artistic legacy.
Her connection with Singapore also holds particular significance. In 2017, YAYOI KUSAMA: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow at National Gallery Singapore attracted more than 235,000 visitors, becoming one of the institution’s most highly attended exhibitions. Her most recent Singapore exhibition, Every Day I Pray for Love, was presented earlier in 2026.
Even in the final chapter of her life, Kusama’s creative energy remained undiminished. She continued to work until her final days, pursuing the ideas of eternal love and the soul that had increasingly occupied her later practice. Her passing brings to a close one of the most remarkable artistic lives of the past century.
From the delicate repetitions of the Infinity Nets to the mirrored universes of the Infinity Rooms, from endlessly multiplying polka dots to her unmistakable pumpkins, Kusama spent a lifetime transforming deeply personal experiences into a visual language understood across cultures and generations.
For Kusama, infinity was never merely a visual device. It was a way of understanding existence itself—the individual dissolving into something larger, boundaries disappearing between the self and the universe, and art becoming a means through which fear, solitude and uncertainty might be transformed into hope and love.
Ninety-seven years of life. Nearly a lifetime devoted to creation.
Yayoi Kusama may have left this world, but the dots, reflections and infinite spaces she created will continue to expand—in museums, collections and in the memories of millions who have encountered her extraordinary universe.
In memory of Yayoi Kusama.
1929–2026
Yang Gallery pays tribute to an extraordinary artist whose vision transformed contemporary art and whose pursuit of infinity will continue to resonate across generations.