appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

hooksArticlePageFloatingButtonConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

Chloe Loung

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese avant-garde artist whose obsessive polka dots, towering pumpkin sculptures and mesmerising Infinity Mirror Rooms captivated audiences worldwide, has died at the age of 97.
The artist died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo due to multiple organ failure. Her studio and the city’s Yayoi Kusama Museum confirmed the news on August 27.
“Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction and poetry,” her studio said in a statement.
The museum added that Kusama “held fast to her belief in saving the world through love until the very end”.


Kusama enjoyed a particularly strong following in Hong Kong, and the city functioned as her primary commercial art market across Asia. Notably, it hosted the largest retrospective of her work on the continent outside her native Japan.
That landmark exhibition, “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now”, was launched by Hong Kong’s M+ museum to celebrate its first anniversary in November 2022.
Spanning eight decades, the retrospective featured more than 200 works and proved a massive public draw, attracting more than 280,000 visitors before it concluded in May 2023. The museum assembled the display with works loaned from major public museums and private collections across Asia, Europe and the United States, alongside materials from Kusama’s personal studio archives.
Three major new works commissioned specifically for M+ debuted at the retrospective: Death of Nerves, Dots Obsession – Aspiring to Heaven’s Love and Pumpkin (all 2022), which featured two giant pumpkin sculptures.


Beyond museum walls, auction rooms across the city – including Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Phillips – regularly broke record sales with her works as headliner lots.
In April 2019, her oil painting Interminable Net #4 (1959) was sold for HK$62.43 million (US$7.96 million) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, beating the previous world record for Kusama from 2014 and setting a record for a work by a female artist sold at auction in Asia at the time.
In May 2023, Christie’s Hong Kong sold A Flower (2014) for HK$78.1 million, the highest price for any Kusama work in Hong Kong.
More recently, Bonhams HK sold Infinity (1995) for HK$46.4 million in May 2024.

The city also served as a major launch pad for her commercial activations, especially during her 2023 global campaign with Louis Vuitton, which featured public art takeovers and eye-catching pop-ups across central retail hubs.
Kusama’s final years were remarkably productive. Her late career was marked by major retrospectives such as the Fondation Beyeler and Museum Ludwig’s touring exhibition (2025-26), solo shows at the Yayoi Kusama Museum (2025-26) and “Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love” at SFMOMA in San Francisco (2023-24). A major retrospective at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig concluded on August 2, just weeks before her death.
Kusama’s studio confirmed that she painted until her final days.
“We will carry forward Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world,” the studio’s statement read.
From childhood hallucinations to global artistic acclaim
Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, Kusama endured a difficult childhood marked by an abusive mother and a philandering father. Her wealthy family managed plant nurseries, and as a child, Kusama began experiencing hallucinations in which flowers would swarm around and speak to her.
Her coping mechanism was to draw what she saw – fields of dots and nets that would become her lifelong visual language.
“I don’t want to cure my mental problems, rather I want to utilise them as a generating force for my art,” Kusama was quoted as saying in an article published by the South China Morning Post in 2017. “My art originates from hallucinations only I can see … All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease.”
I am fighting with my sickness from childhood. This made me original and creative
Yayoi Kusama
Later, she grew frustrated with the confining nature of Japanese society and rejecting an arranged marriage, Kusama left for America in 1957 at age 28 and began making her iconic “infinity net” paintings – vast fields of impastoed polka dots that stretched across the canvas.
In 1962, she sold her first infinity net painting to artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd for US$75. In 2014, her White No 28 (1960) sold for US$7.1 million at Christie’s in New York, making her the most expensive living female artist at the time.
Throughout the 1960s, Kusama staged provocative “body festivals” with naked performers painted in polka dots, to the point where Andy Warhol was famously accused of copying her work.

Infamously radical in her art, she published a publicly distributed manifesto titled “An Open Letter to My Hero, Richard M. Nixon” at the height of the Vietnam war in 1968, as part of her anti-war performance art – offering to sleep with the just elected US president in exchange for an end to the war.
Around 1977, a few years after returning to Japan, Kusama voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and lived there for decades, being driven to her nearby studio each morning. She divided her time between the hospital and her studio until her final days.
Despite her struggles, Kusama achieved belated but spectacular recognition in her later years. She received Japan’s prestigious Order of Culture in 2016, and the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in 2017. She became one of the world’s bestselling artists, with total career auction sales exceeding US$1 billion.
“I am fighting with my sickness from childhood. This made me original and creative,” she told the SCMP in 2005. “The development of my philosophy in sculpture, installation and happenings was all my ideas, against the old-fashioned ideas.”


Mariko Mori’s ‘All That Shines’ at Mori Art Museum: inside her landmark Tokyo exhibition

The inspiring story of Hong Kong dancer and filmmaker who began at 48 after leaving Apple

The tragic Qing dynasty politician whose legacy lives on in descendant’s new novel

16th Gwangju Biennale rises above controversies as one of art world’s best in recent years

Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist famous for pumpkins and polka dots, dies aged 97

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama waves during a press preview of her exhibition titled “My Eternal Soul” at the National Art Centre in Tokyo on February 21, 2017. Photo: AFP

One of Kusama’s pumpkins is displayed at the Harbour Arts Sculpture Park on Hong Kong’s Central Harbourfront in February 2018. Photo: Sam Tsang

A woman is immersed in the mirrored space of Kusama’s Dots Obsession – Aspiring to Heaven’s Love (2022) during the “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now” exhibition at M+ museum in Hong Kong in November 2022. Photo: May Tse

Kusama’s Interminable Net #4 (1959). Photo: Yayoi Kusama/Sotheby’s

Kusama paints dots on Kent Feathergill’s body during a live performance in New York in 1967. Photo: Getty Images

Kusama inside her Infinity Mirrored Room installation titled “The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” (2013) during a media preview of her exhibition at the David Zwirner gallery in New York on November 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters

Taiwan vs South Korean art biennale: inside the fierce political row over pavilion name

A view of the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall during the biennale’s 15th edition in 2024. A row has erupted between Taiwan and the Gwangju Biennale over the naming of a pavilion, sparking accusations of political censorship. Photo: courtesy of Gwangju Biennale

This official overview of the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project erroneously lists Thailand as a participant in the 2021 edition. Photo: Gwangju Biennale Foundation

German artist Anne Imhof on love, LGBTQ visibility and control ahead of her Hong Kong show

German artist Anne Imhof at Tai Kwun in Central, Hong Kong, where her work “House of Swans” will be performed from September 25, 2026. Photo: Karma Lo



A scene from Anne Imhof’s “Doom: House of Hope” (2025). Photo: Anne Imhof

Imhof and her partner, Devon Teuscher, at the American Ballet Theatre’s 2025 Spring Gala at Cipriani South Street, in New York, on May 28, 2025. Photo: Variety via Getty Images

Eliza Douglas (standing), Imhof’s former partner, during a performance of “Faust” at the German Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in May 2017. Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski

Actors perform under a raised glass floor during a scene from “Faust” at the press preview of the 2017 Venice Biennale. Photo: AFP

One of Imhof’s bronze relief sculptures that will feature in “House of Swans” at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. Photo: Ingo Kniest

Imhof, pictured at Tai Kwun, tends to resist the notion that her art should deliver overt messages. Photo: Karma Lo

The “Jumbotron” countdown clock in Imhof’s “Doom: House of Hope” (2025). Photo: Anne Imhof

3 million mosaic pieces later, artist Sung Tieu asks Germany to ‘wake up’ to its immigrants

Sung Tieu (centre) co-conceived “Ruin”, the German pavilion’s exhibition at the 2026 Venice Biennale, with the late Henrike Naumann (left). Kathleen Reinhardt (right) curated the exhibition. Photo: Victoria Tomaschko


An external view of the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. The facade is covered in Sung Tieu’s Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable (2026). Photo: Andrea Rossetti

The entrance to the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Photo: Jens Ziehe

Two works by Tieu in the German Pavilion for the 61st Venice Biennale. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

An installation view of Tieu’s The Ruling (The Banque de l’Indochine’s Profits, 1875-1939) (2025) at the 14th Taipei Biennial. Photo: courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Lu Guo-Way

But The Flesh Is Weak (2026), by Sung Tieu, at the German pavilion, includes glass casts of the artist’s mother’s legs. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

From breast milk to menstrual blood, how artist Jiabao Li challenges norms

Artist Jiabao Li at her solo exhibition “Womb Wetware” at San Francisco’s Tiat Gallery. Photo: Daniel Clayton

Li in the washroom at San Francisco’s Tiat Gallery, in which she has installed her work “Give me a Red Tape” (2026). The work consists of wall displays made up of decades of reproductive propaganda slogans in China. Photo: Daniel Clayton 

“What makes us most Human is also so Animal” (2026), a performance with tasting by Jiabao Li, featured the breast milk of several mammals and Li’s own. Photo: Daniel Clayton

Li conducts a blind tasting session of milk from a variety of mammals, including her own, at the opening of her exhibition “Womb Wetware”. Photo: courtesy of Jiabao Li

The washroom at San Francisco’s Tiat Gallery, in which Li has installed her work “Give me a Red Tape” (2026). Photo: courtesy of Jiabao Li 

Lifestyle

Arts

The avant-garde artist, who enjoyed a strong following in Hong Kong, died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo due to multiple organ failure


The avant-garde artist, who enjoyed a strong following in Hong Kong, died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo due to multiple organ failure.


Japan

Auctions

Obituaries

Sotheby’s

Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist famous for pumpkins and polka dots, dies aged 97

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The avant-garde artist, who enjoyed a strong following in Hong Kong, died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo due to multiple organ failure

The avant-garde artist, who enjoyed a strong following in Hong Kong, died on August 14 at a hospital in Tokyo due to multiple organ failure