When Yayoi Kusama died in Tokyo on 14 August, aged 97, she left behind a legacy almost unparalleled in contemporary art. The Japanese artist, who arrived in New York in 1958 as an outsider—female, Asian and largely unknown—eventually became one of the most recognisable artists on the planet. Her dots and pumpkins migrated from canvases and sculptures onto handbags and shopfronts; her Infinity Mirror Rooms generated queues around museums and millions of selfies.
Yet Kusama’s visibility has, when it comes to the structures that once excluded her, remained extraordinary.
“Kusama’s global success has had enormous symbolic force,” says Izumi Nakajima, an art historian specialising in feminism and post-war Japanese art. “Yet the exceptional success of an individual woman artist and a structural transformation in the gendered and geographical asymmetries of the art world operate on different registers.” A canon, Nakajima adds, can accommodate “a small number of monumental women artists while continuing to marginalise a far larger number of women”.
That distinction complicates the familiar story of Kusama as a trailblazer for women and Asian artists. Japan in the 1950s and early 60s, Nakajima says, had a substantial cohort of women pursuing experimental practices, including Atsuko Tanaka and Hideko Fukushima. To project Kusama’s present fame backwards risks producing a history in which she appears uniquely radical from the outset. Kusama’s departure from Japan in 1957 was crucial: while Japan’s high-growth era increasingly reorganised women’s lives around domesticity, she pursued her career abroad, relentlessly making both her art and herself visible through exhibitions, photographs, fashion, happenings and the media.
Is fame the same as success?
For the Tokyo- and Vienna-based feminist and queer publishing and research collective Multiple Spirits, the transformation since Kusama’s early career is nevertheless real. Compared with a global art world then dominated overwhelmingly by white men, opportunities to encounter artists from different backgrounds have unquestionably expanded, the collective says. But it questions whether Kusama’s trajectory should still function as a model of “success” when the criteria by which success is measured remain largely inherited from that same art world. “Values and measures different from those shaped by a white male-centred art world are still insufficient,” the collective says.
Nor does Nakajima see Kusama fitting comfortably into another role frequently assigned to her: that of the feminist icon. Rather than treating feminism as “an attribute or categorical designation”, Nakajima argues, it is more productive to use it as a critical method through which to read her work. Kusama’s repetition, sexuality, self-representation and negotiation of the body all invite feminist interpretation. But unlike strands of feminist art that rejected Modernism’s claims to autonomy and universality, Kusama repeatedly resisted being circumscribed as either a “woman” or a “Japanese” artist. “She sought to occupy the position of the universal artistic subject that Modernism had imagined,” Nakajima says.
The Multiple Spirits collective similarly notes a gap between Kusama’s international reception and her popular image at home. In Japan, it says, she is less commonly understood as a feminist icon than as the creator of colourful polka-dotted paintings and installations. The politics of her 1960s happenings—their anti-war messages and calls for sexual liberation—have received comparatively less attention. Rather than reducing Kusama to an individual “feminist” or “queer” identity, the collective argues that these radical practices need to be reconsidered within the social and cultural conditions that produced them.
Journey to global cultural brand
Another paradox lies in Kusama’s transformation from avant-garde provocateur to global cultural brand. In 1966, she appeared uninvited at the Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden, offering mirrored spheres for sale beneath a sign declaring “Your Narcissism for Sale”. Decades later, the mirrors themselves became among contemporary art’s most coveted attractions. Visitors queue for hours to spend seconds inside an Infinity Mirror Room, phone in hand, while collaborations with Louis Vuitton turned her dots into a globally recognisable luxury motif. Critics have consequently cast Kusama as both a precursor of the immersive “artainment” economy and one of its most successful brands.
For Hidenori Ota, the founder of the gallery Ota Fine Arts and Kusama’s longtime representative in Japan, the artist’s embrace of visibility cannot be separated from the struggle to make herself heard. “I imagine that, in order to deliver a voice that otherwise could not reach people, she first needed to make her own presence larger,” he says. Having directly experienced war, Ota suggests, Kusama sought a language capable of reaching a mass audience, repeatedly returning to the word “love” as a vehicle for criticism.
Kusama and a life-size replica, from her collaboration with Louis Vuitton © Yayoi Kusama
Kusama’s popularity also made mental illness unusually visible within mainstream contemporary art. She voluntarily lived at a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo from 1977 onward, working for decades at a nearby studio. While frequently connecting her compulsive repetition and artistic production to hallucinations and psychological distress, she generally eschewed disability advocacy. Narratives around Kusama have drawn criticism for reproducing the familiar trope of the “mad genius” who triumphs over adversity, while doing relatively little to address disability, psychiatric experience or accessibility. Nakajima similarly warns against narratives that link women’s creativity to illness, trauma and psychological compulsion: such frameworks, she says, have historically helped women artists gain recognition while simultaneously restricting how their practices are understood.
Perhaps the most troubling asterisk in Kusama’s legacy relates to her descriptions of Black people in her 2002 autobiography, Infinity Net. In the original Japanese edition, she blamed Black residents and unhoused people for the decline of her New York neighbourhood. That, along with other denigrating lines, was omitted from the 2011 English translation. When the comments received renewed attention ahead of her 2023 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kusama said she “deeply regret[ted] using hurtful and offensive language” and apologised for the pain she had caused.
A symbol of inclusion
The episode sits uneasily beside the universalist language of love that characterised Kusama’s later public persona. Asked how it should shape her legacy, Ota says: “Rather than simply viewing her through that label of ‘racist’, [her words] should be examined in relation to the social conditions and historical context of the time.” He adds that it requires further debate and study. The controversy nevertheless underscores the limits of transforming a complex historical figure into an uncomplicated symbol of inclusion.
Ota is likewise sceptical of attributing subsequent changes in Asia’s art world to a single artist. “Rather than Kusama changing things herself, I think the larger shifts of the era—particularly the social and economic rise of Asia—were more significant,” he says. “She moved in step with those larger changes.”
Kusama’s 1967 “happening”, Body Festival, in which polka dot-painted participants danced in public New York spaces © Yayoi Kusama
The Multiple Spirits collective flags how, in Japan and beyond, as shrinking cultural budgets require museums to pursue larger audiences and alternative funding sources, Kusama shows became reliable for producing economic results. But her visibility has not particularly helped other marginalised artists. “We cannot entrust structural change in the art world to the success story of a minority artist,” the collective says. What matters instead are less spectacular changes: improving working conditions and accessibility, using inclusive language, protecting freedom of expression and connecting such efforts across institutions.
Kusama entered a Western, male-dominated art world and ultimately became bigger than almost any artist within it. But “exceptional success and structural inequality can coexist”, Nakajima observes. Kusama changed who could occupy the centre of contemporary art, but not the nature of that centre.