Yayoi Kusama, born March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan, is the rare artist whose private compulsion became a global visual language. A painter first and always, she is also a sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, novelist, and designer, and for nearly eight decades she has pursued a single program she calls self-obliteration: dissolving the self, and everything else, into fields of dots and nets. The motifs come from hallucinations she has experienced since the age of ten, when patterns seemed to spill off surfaces and swallow the room. Rather than flee the visions, she painted them, over and over, until the repetition itself became the art. The result sits somewhere between therapy and cosmology, and it made her, in her tenth decade, one of the most visited and best-selling artists alive.
The career divides cleanly into acts. In New York from 1958, she painted the white Infinity Nets, vast canvases of small looping strokes that anticipated Minimalism and drew Donald Judd as an early champion, then invented soft sculpture, built the first Infinity Mirror Room in 1965, and staged anti-war happenings that made her tabloid-famous and art-world notorious. Back in Japan from 1973, unwell and largely forgotten, she checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital in 1977 and has lived there voluntarily ever since, walking to her studio across the street to paint. A 1989 New York retrospective and the 1993 Venice Biennale, where Japan gave her its national pavilion, rebuilt the reputation; the mirror rooms, the pumpkins, and the polka dots then carried it further than any critic predicted.
Today the work circulates at a scale few living artists have seen. Her 2024–25 survey at the National Gallery of Victoria became the most attended ticketed art exhibition in Australian history, a three-museum European retrospective is currently mid-tour at Museum Ludwig in Cologne before moving to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk, and her auction record stands at $10.5 million. At 97, she still paints nearly every day.
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Quick Facts
| Real Name: | Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生) |
| Profession: | Painter, sculptor, and installation artist |
| Born: | March 22, 1929 |
| Age: | 97 (as of 2026) |
| Birthplace: | Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan |
| Nationality: | Japanese |
| Movement / Style: | Postwar avant-garde; a precursor of Minimalism and Pop art; her own program of obsessional, repetition-driven art she calls self-obliteration |
| Primary Medium: | Oil and acrylic on canvas; soft sculpture; mirrored installation |
| Represented By: | Ota Fine Arts (Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai); David Zwirner (New York); Victoria Miro (London) |
| Known For: | Polka dots and the Infinity Net paintings; walk-in Infinity Mirror Rooms; dotted pumpkins; the anti-war happenings of late-1960s New York |
| Notable Works: | Infinity Nets series; Accumulation No. 1; Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field; Narcissus Garden; Pumpkin (Naoshima); My Eternal Soul series |
| Awards: | Praemium Imperiale (2006); Order of Culture (2016); Person of Cultural Merit (2009); Asahi Prize (2001); Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Officier (2003) |
| Zodiac Sign: | Aries |
| Relationship: | Single; never married. Her defining relationship, a platonic decade-long bond with the artist Joseph Cornell, ended with his death in 1972 |
| Years Active: | 1952 to present |
Featured Video
Video courtesy of Tate’s official YouTube channel. Kusama narrates her own story, from the Matsumoto childhood to the New York nets to the Tokyo studio, alongside curator Frances Morris and her 1960s New York dealer Richard Castellane.
Early Life & Education
Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, a castle town in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, the youngest of four children in a prosperous family that ran a plant nursery and seed farm. The comfort was material, not emotional. Her parents’ arranged marriage was miserable; her father was chronically unfaithful, and her mother, humiliated and volatile, sent the young Yayoi to spy on his affairs, an assignment that left the artist with a lifelong aversion to sex that her work would spend decades confronting. Around the age of ten she began experiencing hallucinations, fields of dots and nets and talking flowers that seemed to devour the visible world. She started drawing what she saw. Her mother confiscated her inks and canvases and told her a rich man’s household, not a studio, was her future. Kusama drew faster, before the materials could be taken away.
The war supplied its own darkness. At thirteen she was conscripted to sew parachutes in a military factory, spending her adolescence in a dim workroom under air-raid sirens, an experience that later surfaced in anti-war collages and in her earliest surviving paintings, bleak canvases like Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization) (1950), where landscape itself seems traumatized. In 1948 she enrolled at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts to study nihonga, the codified traditional Japanese painting style, and found the discipline suffocating. She was already exhibiting: her first solo shows came in Matsumoto in 1952, precocious displays of hundreds of works on paper.
The escape route she engineered herself. In 1955, having seen their work in a secondhand bookshop, she wrote cold to the American painters Kenneth Callahan and Georgia O’Keeffe; both replied, and O’Keeffe, improbably generous to an unknown from provincial Japan, offered advice, encouragement, and later practical help with dealers. Kusama left for the United States in 1957, showing first at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle, and reached New York in 1958. Before leaving, she destroyed hundreds of early works on a riverbank in Matsumoto, a bridge-burning she has described as a vow to make it or not come back.
Career Highlights and Milestones
New York gave her the scale her visions demanded. Beginning in 1958 she painted the Infinity Nets: enormous canvases, one eventually 33 feet long, covered edge to edge in small scalloped strokes of white over a dark ground, no center, no composition, no end. Her October 1959 debut at Brata Gallery, five large white nets, was reviewed with real enthusiasm by a young Donald Judd, who bought one, as did Frank Stella. The paintings read now as a hinge in postwar art: made by hand with obsessive labor like Abstract Expressionism, but cool, serial, and allover like the Minimalism that had not yet been named. European vanguards noticed before America fully did; in 1962 she was the only woman in the landmark Nul exhibition at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, showing alongside Lucio Fontana, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker, who traded works with her.
The 1960s inventions came fast, and other people profited from several of them. In 1962 she debuted soft sculpture, ordinary furniture colonized by hand-sewn stuffed phallic protrusions, a form Claes Oldenburg took up to acclaim shortly after showing beside her; his wife, by Kusama’s account, apologized. Her 1963 Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show wallpapered a gallery with 999 repeated photographs of a phallus-encrusted rowboat, a repetition strategy Andy Warhol admired aloud and echoed in his own wallpaper works. In 1965 she built Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field, the first of the mirror rooms, multiplying a dotted field into apparent endlessness; Lucas Samaras’s mirrored room appeared the following year at a far more powerful gallery. The pattern of being first and uncredited, she has said plainly, contributed to breakdowns. It also never stopped her. At the 1966 Venice Biennale, uninvited, she installed Narcissus Garden, 1,500 mirrored spheres on the lawn outside the Italian pavilion, and sold them at 1,200 lire apiece until officials intervened, a swipe at the art market that the art market eventually forgave and then canonized.
From 1967 she moved into happenings: body-painting performances, an anti-war program that put naked, dot-painted participants in front of the New York Stock Exchange and inside MoMA’s sculpture garden, an open letter to Richard Nixon offering polka dots in exchange for peace in Vietnam, and a prize-winning experimental film, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967). The notoriety was immense and the art world’s patience was not. Broke, exhausted, and increasingly unwell, she returned to Japan in 1973 to a press that treated her as a scandal, not an artist. After a suicide attempt, she found a hospital practicing art therapy and, in 1977, checked herself in. She never checked out, by choice: she took up permanent residence, built a studio across the street, and kept working, writing surrealist novels and poetry when painting was impossible, including Manhattan Suicide Addict (1978) and the prize-winning The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street.
The rediscovery was slow, then total. A 1989 retrospective at New York’s Center for International Contemporary Arts, organized by Alexandra Munroe, re-argued her place in postwar art; in 1993 Japan devoted its Venice Biennale pavilion to her alone, widely noted as the pavilion’s first single-artist presentation, and she filled it with mirrors and dotted pumpkins. The pumpkin, a form she had loved since childhood on the seed farm, became a signature: the 1994 yellow Pumpkin on a pier at Naoshima inaugurated her outdoor sculpture. The 1998 LACMA and MoMA survey Love Forever restored the New York decade to the record, and the 2011–12 retrospective that traveled from Madrid’s Reina Sofía through the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and the Whitney made her a global phenomenon. Since then the numbers have simply kept climbing, from the timed tickets and city-block queues of the Infinity Mirrors tour to the attendance and auction records of the 2020s, itemized below. Through it all she paints, daily, the raw and vivid My Eternal Soul canvases that now number in the hundreds.
Selected Career Highlights
- 1952: First solo exhibitions of works on paper in Matsumoto, at age 23
- 1957: First American solo show at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery, Seattle; emigrates to the United States
- 1959: New York debut at Brata Gallery; the white Infinity Nets are praised and purchased by Donald Judd and Frank Stella
- 1962: Only woman in the Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; debuts soft sculpture with Accumulation No. 1
- 1963: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show at Gertrude Stein Gallery pioneers repeated-image installation
- 1965: Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field at Castellane Gallery, the first mirror room
- 1966: Narcissus Garden staged uninvited at the 33rd Venice Biennale
- 1967–69: Anti-war happenings across New York; Kusama’s Self-Obliteration wins experimental film prizes in 1968
- 1973: Returns to Japan; enters Seiwa Hospital voluntarily in 1977 and takes up permanent residence
- 1983: Wins the Yasei Jidai literary award for new writers for The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street
- 1989: Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, begins the revival
- 1993: Represents Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale, the Japanese Pavilion’s first single-artist presentation
- 1994: Pumpkin installed at Benesse Art Site Naoshima, launching three decades of outdoor commissions
- 2012: Tate Modern and Whitney retrospective stops; first Louis Vuitton collaboration with Marc Jacobs
- 2017: Yayoi Kusama Museum opens in Tokyo; Infinity Mirrors begins its record-setting North American tour
- 2024–25: NGV Melbourne retrospective sells 570,537 tickets, the most attended ticketed art exhibition in Australian history
- 2025–26: Three-museum European retrospective opens at Fondation Beyeler with two new 2025 mirror rooms, touring to Museum Ludwig and the Stedelijk
Major Recognition
- Praemium Imperiale for painting (2006), the Japan Art Association’s global arts prize and one of the field’s highest honors
- Order of Culture (2016), conferred by the Emperor of Japan; her London gallery notes she was the first woman honored in the category covering her field
- Person of Cultural Merit, Japan (2009)
- Asahi Prize (2001) for contributions to Japanese culture
- Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Officier, France (2003)
- Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, and a US lifetime achievement award (2006)
- Best Gallery Show awards from the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for 1995/96 and 1996/97
- Education Minister’s Art Encouragement Prize and Foreign Minister’s Commendation, Japan (2000)
- Selection to the TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people (2016)
- Prizes for Kusama’s Self-Obliteration at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition, Belgium, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival (1968)
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Awards and Accolades
| Year | Award | Category | Context | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1968 | Prize, Fourth International Experimental Film Competition (Belgium) | Film | For Kusama’s Self-Obliteration; the film also took second prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival | Awarded |
| 1983 | Tenth Literary Award for New Writers, Yasei Jidai magazine | Literature | For the novel The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street | Won |
| 1993 | Japanese Pavilion, 45th Venice Biennale | National representation | Widely noted as the pavilion’s first single-artist presentation | Selected |
| 1996 | Best Gallery Show, International Association of Art Critics (US chapter) | Exhibition | For her 1995/96 New York shows; she won again for 1996/97 | Awarded |
| 2000 | Education Minister’s Art Encouragement Prize | State honor (Japan) | Awarded alongside a Foreign Minister’s Commendation the same year | Awarded |
| 2001 | Asahi Prize (71st) | Culture (Japan) | Long-running prize for outstanding contributions to Japanese culture and society | Awarded |
| 2003 | Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Officier | State honor (France) | France’s order for distinction in the arts | Conferred |
| 2006 | Praemium Imperiale | Painting | The Japan Art Association’s international arts prize, among the highest honors in the field | Awarded |
| 2006 | Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette | State honor (Japan) | Conferred in the same year as a US lifetime achievement award | Conferred |
| 2009 | Person of Cultural Merit | State honor (Japan) | Government designation for exceptional cultural contribution | Conferred |
| 2016 | Order of Culture | State honor (Japan) | Presented by the Emperor; per Victoria Miro, the first woman honored in the category covering her field | Conferred |
| 2016 | TIME 100 | Recognition | Named among the world’s most influential people | Selected |
Selected Works
| Year | Title | Medium | Collection / Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1959 | No. F | Oil on canvas | Museum of Modern Art, New York | From the debut body of white Infinity Nets; delicate at a distance, obsessive up close, and a hinge between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism |
| 1960 | Infinity Nets Yellow | Oil on canvas | National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. | The net going electric; color enters the series without loosening its grip |
| 1962 | Accumulation No. 1 | Sewn stuffed fabric, paint, and chair fringe | Museum of Modern Art, New York | The first phallus-covered armchair; soft sculpture begins here, whatever happened afterward |
| 1965 | Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field | Mirrored-room installation with stuffed fabric forms | First realized at Castellane Gallery, New York; later fabrications in museum collections | The original mirror room, and the moment painting’s endlessness became a space a body could enter |
| 1966 | Narcissus Garden | 1,500 mirrored spheres | First staged at the 33rd Venice Biennale; later versions in collections including the National Gallery of Victoria (1966/2024) | Gate-crashed Venice and mocked the market by selling reflection at two dollars a sphere |
| 1967 | Kusama’s Self-Obliteration | 16mm film | Distributed internationally; excerpted in her retrospectives | Prize-winning document of the dot-painting happenings, made with Jud Yalkut |
| 1994 | Pumpkin | Painted fiber-reinforced plastic | Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Japan | Her first outdoor sculpture and an unofficial national landmark; swept into the sea by a 2021 typhoon and replaced with a new version in October 2022 |
| 2009–present | My Eternal Soul series | Acrylic on canvas | Collection of the artist; examples in international collections | The vast late-painting cycle, raw, bright, and made daily in the Tokyo studio; a core of the current retrospectives |
| 2011 | Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life | Mirrored-room installation with LED lights and water | Tate, London | Made for the 2012 Tate Modern retrospective and among her largest rooms; anchored Tate’s multi-year mirror-rooms display |
| 2013 | Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away | Mirrored-room installation with LED lights | The Broad, Los Angeles | The room that turned museum-going into a timed 60-second pilgrimage and made her a social-media phenomenon |
| 2013 | Love Is Calling | Mirrored-room installation with inflatable forms | Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston | Tentacled, candy-colored, and paired with a recording of Kusama reciting her poem on death; toured to the Pérez Art Museum Miami |
| 2020 | Dancing Pumpkin | Painted bronze | National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne | Five meters of pumpkin on tentacle legs, acquired out of the record-setting NGV retrospective |
| 2025 | Infinity Mirrored Room – The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe | Mirrored-room installation | Collection of the artist | Created at 96 for the Beyeler, Ludwig, and Stedelijk retrospective; proof the late style is still expanding |
Major Exhibitions
| Year | Exhibition | Institution | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1952 | First solo exhibition | First Community Centre, Matsumoto | Solo |
| 1959 | Yayoi Kusama (white Infinity Nets debut) | Brata Gallery, New York | Solo |
| 1962 | Nul | Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam | Group |
| 1965 | Floor Show (Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field) | Castellane Gallery, New York | Solo |
| 1989 | Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective | Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York | Retrospective |
| 1993 | Japanese Pavilion, 45th Venice Biennale | Venice Biennale, Venice | Solo |
| 1998–99 | Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968 | Los Angeles County Museum of Art (with the Museum of Modern Art, New York) | Retrospective |
| 2011–12 | Yayoi Kusama | Tate Modern, London (co-organized with Museo Reina Sofía; also shown at Centre Pompidou and the Whitney Museum) | Retrospective |
| 2017–19 | Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. | Retrospective |
| 2022–23 | Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now | M+, Hong Kong | Retrospective |
| 2024–25 | Yayoi Kusama | National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne | Retrospective |
| 2025–27 | Yayoi Kusama | Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (touring to Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) | Retrospective |
Net Worth, Income, & Lifestyle
| Net Worth (2026) | Public estimates vary widely. Kusama has not disclosed a verified net worth figure. Treat numbers found online as unconfirmed. |
| Income Sources | Primary-market sales through her three galleries; museum exhibition and licensing arrangements; editioned prints and sculptures; official merchandise through the studio-run YAYOI KUSAMA STORE; fashion collaborations, most prominently Louis Vuitton in 2012 and 2023; and royalties from her novels, poetry, and autobiography. |
| Market & Representation | Represented by Ota Fine Arts, David Zwirner, and Victoria Miro. Her auction record is $10.5 million (with fees) for the 1959 white net painting Untitled (Nets) at Phillips New York in May 2022, as reported by The Art Newspaper. Market reports put her 2024 auction total at roughly $58.8 million, the highest of any contemporary artist for a second consecutive year, and the Hiscox Artist Top 100 analysis notes that around 80 percent of her post-2000 works at auction sell in Hong Kong. Early Infinity Nets command the top of the market; pumpkins in paint and bronze anchor the mid-seven-figure band. |
| Properties & Assets | Most detailed financial and property information is kept private. Reliable public documentation is limited. Her studio is in Shinjuku, Tokyo, across the street from the hospital where she has lived by choice since 1977; the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo is operated by her foundation. |
| Lifestyle | Famously regimented: she paints at the studio nearly every day and returns to the hospital at night, appearing publicly in her red bobbed wig and polka-dot dress. She has said the routine is what makes the work, and the life, possible. |
Social Media & Online Presence
| No verified personal account. The closest official presence is the Yayoi Kusama Museum’s account, @yayoikusamamuseum, run by the Yayoi Kusama Foundation in Tokyo. Her galleries (Ota Fine Arts, David Zwirner, Victoria Miro) post her work regularly. Multiple unofficial accounts style themselves “official”; none are. | |
| X (Twitter) | No official account. Accounts posting under her name are fan-run or impersonations. |
| No official personal page; museum and gallery pages are the reliable sources. | |
| YouTube | No official artist channel. Institutional films from Tate, the Hirshhorn, M+, and her galleries are the dependable video sources. |
| Official Website | The studio-run site at yayoi-kusama.jp carries her biography, news, and exhibition history; the museum is at yayoikusamamuseum.jp; official merchandise is sold only through yayoikusamastore.com, which has publicly warned about a counterfeit clone site. |
NOTE: In addition to any official accounts listed above, many fan-run pages, appreciation accounts, and art-history accounts exist across platforms. These are not confirmed to be affiliated with Yayoi Kusama or her studio. Links and usernames can change at any time.
Trivia & Lesser-Known Facts
- At thirteen she spent the war sewing parachutes in a Japanese military factory, working in near darkness under air-raid sirens, years she has connected directly to the anti-war strain in her art.
- Her ticket out of Japan came from a cold letter: in 1955 she wrote to Georgia O’Keeffe after finding her work in a secondhand bookshop, and O’Keeffe not only replied with advice but later nudged her own dealer toward the unknown Japanese painter.
- On her first day in New York, by her own account, she climbed the Empire State Building, looked down at the city, and resolved to stand out from everyone below.
- At the 1966 Venice Biennale she sold the mirrored spheres of Narcissus Garden to passersby for 1,200 lire (about $2) apiece, with a sign reading “Your Narcissism for Sale,” until Biennale officials shut the stand down.
- She was first, repeatedly, without credit: soft sculpture before Claes Oldenburg’s acclaim, repeated-image wallpaper before Andy Warhol’s, a mirror room before Lucas Samaras’s. She has said watching those ideas succeed under other names contributed to her breakdowns.
- The beloved yellow Pumpkin on the Naoshima pier was swept into the Seto Inland Sea by a typhoon in August 2021; a newly fabricated version was installed in October 2022 and greeted like a returning celebrity.
Quotes
“My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was always standing at the center of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me.”
– Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy (Tate Publishing, 2011)
“When I was drawing, the pattern would expand outside of the canvas to fill the floor and the wall. So when I looked far away, I would see the hallucination, and I would get surrounded by that vision. That is how I became an environmental artist.”
– Yayoi Kusama, interview in Yayoi Kusama – Obsessed with Polka Dots, Tate film (2012)
“Our earth is like one little polka dot, among millions of other celestial bodies, one orb full of hatred and strife amid the peaceful, silent spheres. Let’s you and I change all that and make this world a new Garden of Eden.”
– Yayoi Kusama, An Open Letter to My Hero, Richard M. Nixon (1968), quoted in Tate’s “An Introduction to Yayoi Kusama”
“I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.”
– Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy (Tate Publishing, 2011)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q: How old is Yayoi Kusama?
A: She is 97, born March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan, and she still paints nearly every day at her Tokyo studio.
Q: What is Yayoi Kusama best known for?
A: Polka dots, the Infinity Net paintings, the walk-in Infinity Mirror Rooms, and her dotted pumpkin sculptures. She is also remembered for the anti-war happenings she staged in late-1960s New York.
Q: What movement or style is Yayoi Kusama associated with?
A: She belongs to the postwar avant-garde and is regularly cited as a precursor of both Minimalism and Pop art, but she has always worked to her own program, an obsessional art of repetition she calls self-obliteration.
Q: Has Yayoi Kusama won the Praemium Imperiale?
A: Yes. She received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2006, and Japan later conferred its Person of Cultural Merit designation (2009) and the Order of Culture (2016).
Q: Which galleries represent Yayoi Kusama?
A: Ota Fine Arts (Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai), David Zwirner (New York), and Victoria Miro (London).
Q: Where can I see Yayoi Kusama’s work?
A: The Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo shows rotating exhibitions; permanent or long-term installations are at The Broad in Los Angeles, Tate Modern in London, M+ in Hong Kong, and Benesse Art Site Naoshima, with a deep early-work holding at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art. Her touring European retrospective is at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, through August 2, 2026, and opens at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, on September 11, 2026.
Q: Is Yayoi Kusama on social media?
A: No. She has no verified personal accounts; the foundation-run Yayoi Kusama Museum account on Instagram and her galleries’ accounts are the reliable sources, and accounts presenting themselves as her “official” profile are impersonations.
Upcoming Exhibitions & Retrospectives
- Yayoi Kusama (Museum Ludwig, Cologne; on view through August 2, 2026): the second stop of the three-museum European retrospective, mounted for the museum’s fiftieth anniversary with more than 300 works, including the reconstructed 1963 Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show and a rooftop installation of Flowers That Speak All about My Heart Given to the Sky. Confirmed and open.
- KUSAMA’s POP (Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo; on view through August 30, 2026): a focused reading of her relationship to Pop, from airmail-sticker collages to a newly unveiled small mirror room; timed tickets sold online only.
- Yayoi Kusama group presentation (Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo; announced July 10 to August 29, 2026): new and recent Kusama works in a summer group show at her Tokyo gallery; dates per the gallery and subject to change.
- Yayoi Kusama (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; announced September 11, 2026 to January 17, 2027): the retrospective’s final stop, organized with Fondation Beyeler and Museum Ludwig, with timed entry; treat details as subject to change until confirmed by the institution.
- TOKYO ATLAS (Tokyo waterfront area; announced October 10 to December 20, 2026): Kusama is an announced participant in this international exhibition of site-specific work; the organizers have released few details, so treat the listing as subject to change.
All of the above are announced, scheduled, or on view and remain subject to change until confirmed by the institutions involved.
Interviews & Features
- Tate, “An Introduction to Yayoi Kusama”, the museum’s career-spanning primer, threaded with the artist’s own statements and a short late-career Q&A.
- The Art Newspaper, “Yayoi Kusama survey at National Gallery of Victoria becomes best-selling art exhibition in Australian history” (2025), the clearest accounting of the Melbourne attendance record and what it displaced.
- David Zwirner, “Yayoi Kusama Retrospective, Fondation Beyeler” (2025), the gallery’s feature on the current European retrospective and its two new 2025 mirror rooms.
- Dazed, “Inside the lost years of Yayoi Kusama” (2018), a sharp feature on the 1962–89 wilderness years and the borrowing of her ideas.
- Wallpaper*, “Yayoi Kusama film charts her turbulent rise to pop art icon” (2018), on Heather Lenz’s documentary Kusama: Infinity and the biography behind it.
Public Appearances & Events
Kusama, now 97, rarely appears in public and no longer travels; she participates in her openings from Tokyo through new works, statements, and poems, and the events below are where the work itself has been appearing.
- Cologne, March 14, 2026: The European retrospective opened at Museum Ludwig for the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, expanding to more than 300 works, spilling onto a rooftop terrace, and running through August 2, 2026.
- Riehen/Basel, October 12, 2025: Yayoi Kusama, her first Swiss museum retrospective, opened at Fondation Beyeler with over 300 works, more than 130 never before shown in Europe, and the debuts of two mirror rooms made for the show, Infinity Mirrored Room – Illusion Inside the Heart and Infinity Mirrored Room – The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe, both 2025.
- Buffalo, October 2, 2025: One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama opened at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, pairing her first mirror room, Phalli’s Field (1965/2017), with My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe (2018) and a monumental 2016 Pumpkin; it ran through March 2, 2026.
- Melbourne, December 15, 2024 to April 21, 2025: The NGV retrospective wrapped the trees of St Kilda Road in pink-and-white dots, premiered Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light (2024), drew visitors from Billie Eilish to Dua Lipa, and closed at 570,537 tickets, an Australian record.
- London, 2024: Every Day I Pray for Love at Victoria Miro debuted the mirrored-sphere room Infinity Mirrored Room – Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart, her latest London gallery outing.
