Yayoi Kusama

A life inside a pattern

Yayoi Kusama was a Japanese artist, born in Matsumoto in 1929 and died in Tokyo in 2026 at the age of ninety seven. She worked primarily in sculpture and installation, but was also a painter, performance artist, novelist, poet and fashion designer, and is widely regarded as the most important artist to have come out of Japan in the modern period.

Her language begins in illness. From childhood she experienced vivid hallucinations that she described as flashes of light, auras and dense fields of dots, in which patterns multiplied until they engulfed the room, her body and finally everything. She called the sensation self obliteration, and rather than resisting it she made it the organising principle of her art. The polka dot and the net, endlessly repeated, are direct transcriptions of what she saw. She was open all her life about her mental health, and said that art was the only method she had found that relieved her illness.

She was raised in a merchant family that owned a plant nursery and seed farm, an origin visible in the pumpkin, the form she returned to most often and treated as a kind of self portrait.

New York, the happenings, and disappearance

She trained in the traditional nihonga style in Kyoto, found it stifling, and left Japan in her twenties for the United States, corresponding with Georgia O'Keeffe before she went. After a year in Seattle she reached New York at the end of the fifties and became central to the avant garde there.

The Infinity Nets came first, vast canvases covered edge to edge in small repeated marks. Then the soft sculptures, everyday objects such as chairs and ladders encrusted with sewn protrusions, and then the mirrored rooms, purpose built spaces lined with glass in which lights and objects reflect into an apparently endless field. She took Narcissus Garden to the Venice Biennale in 1966, laying a carpet of mirrored spheres on the grass and selling them to passers by until the organisers stopped her, a gesture aimed at the commodification of art.

Through the later sixties she staged happenings in which naked performers were painted with dots, many of them protests against the Vietnam War. The publicity was enormous and the cost was high: her family was shamed, she profited little, and male contemporaries took up her innovations to greater acclaim. She returned to Japan in the seventies to an unsympathetic reception, and from the late seventies lived by choice in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, working daily in a studio nearby for the rest of her life.

The revival

She was nearly forgotten until retrospectives began to restore her, notably the first critical survey of her work in New York in 1989. Representing Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 with a mirrored room of pumpkins, she re entered the international scene decisively, and the spotted yellow pumpkin later installed on a pier at Naoshima became one of the most recognised objects in contemporary art. A fifty year retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 2017 became one of the most heavily attended exhibitions that museum had mounted, and a museum devoted to her work opened in Tokyo in the same year.

What a specialist examines

Kusama's market is layered, and placing a work in the correct tier is the whole of the exercise. Unique paintings on canvas sit at the top, then unique works on paper in gouache, pastel or ink, then sculpture, which may be unique or editioned, then prints and multiples issued in large runs, and finally licensed objects such as scarves and resin pumpkins produced in very high numbers. Two objects carrying the same motif can differ by several orders of magnitude.

Period is decisive. Early work made while she was forming her language is scarce and historically weighted, and any stated date must be consistent with materials and handling. For editions, a specialist records the edition size, the impression number and the publisher. Signature placement is examined closely, since her imagery is among the most widely copied in the market, and registration with the artist's studio, gallery labels and a documented exhibition history all matter. Condition questions vary by tier: pigment fading and creasing on paper, surface stability on painted sculpture, yellowing on resin multiples.