Beyond the polka dots: How Yayoi Kusama channeled her trauma into iconic art

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, recognised globally for her psychedelic polka dots and whimsical pumpkin sculptures, passed away recently at age 97. However, it took her studio a fortnight to issue a statement: “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. She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul.”

Born in Matsumoto, a historic city in the Nagano prefecture in Japan in 1929, she endured a difficult childhood within an affluent but dysfunctional family. She weathered her mother’s discouragement of her interest in painting to study the traditional Nihonga painting in Kyoto in late 1940s. In the ensuing years, serendipity brought her in contact with senior artist Georgia O’Keeffe and they started regularly corresponding with each other. This association led to a major shift in Kusama’s career with the artist shifting to the United States in 1957. She not only found a new home in New York but also sought out western avant-garde forms. There, she found kinship with many artists with “true backbone” and inspiration in visits to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as she acknowledged later in her autobiography, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Net.

Underwhelmed by ‘action painting’, an approach that felt alien to her deeply personal practice, Kusama drifted closer to ideas which were to shape pop art and minimalism in the 1960s. However, as a radical female migrant artist in the US, she did not get the critical recognition she deserved.

Her obsession with repetitive dots had stemmed from hallucinations, which she started experiencing intensely as early as 10 years of age. An unhappy childhood and the traumas associated with WWII only added to her anxieties and trepidations. For an artist, who always identified as an outsider, be it in Japan or the US, the theme of “self-obliteration” became an enduring one. She found herself struggling with severe obsessive-compulsive neurosis, and returned to Japan in 1973. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art,” she had once said. Ultimately, she checked herself into a mental health institution in Tokyo in 1977 and lived there while working during the day at a studio nearby, six days a week.

Significant chapters

The Venice Biennale was to provide two major milestones in her career. In 1966, at a time when the event would put up exhibited works for sale [this was later discontinued], Kusama made an unofficial intervention on the lawns outside the Italian pavilion. She created her performative Narcissus Garden comprising 1500 reflective balls, which she sold for approximately $2 each, holding up a mirror to the self-serving commercialisation of the art world. The Biennale eventually stopped her from selling, arguing that she couldn’t sell art ‘like hot dogs or ice cream cones’, while the installation was allowed to remain. But her critique had registered. 27 years later, Kusama returned officially as the representative of the Japan Pavilion in 1993 where she showcased a retrospective of her works, headlined by the installation, Mirror Room (Pumpkin). The modest vegetable, transformed into a surreal work of art, was to become her signature motif, one that most identify her with today.

In more recent decades, driven by a surge in recognition for women artists and an interest in far-east Asian pop culture, recognition for Kusama’s work received a major fillip. Retrospectives at leading museums followed—the ones at MoMA in New York in 1998 and Tate Modern in London in 2012 were some of the significant ones. Her immersive installation, Infinity/Mirror Rooms, has since travelled the world. After the covid-19 pandemic, the prices of Kusama’s works have also surged in auctions, with her early work Untitled (Nets) from 1959 selling at Phillips New York in 2022 for 10.5 million USD, and A Flower (2014) for 10 million USD at Christie’s Hong Kong sale in 2023, making her one of the most commercially successful living artists.

Kusama leaves behind an abiding legacy, with her Instagrammable installations extremely popular with Millennials and Gen Z, and shows opening to acclaim at leading museums. More profoundly, the manner in which she approached mental health issues through her practice reveals the power of art as therapy—something that will continue to be relevant in years to come.