Sometimes, a great artist gets the last laugh.
Yayoi Kusama is my favorite contemporary artist. Why, you say? It’s complicated, and a story worth telling.
She was ignored for decades. Now she’s the most popular artist on planet earth.
Kusama is a brilliant and pioneering female Japanese artist, who tried to make it in the red hot art scene in 1960s New York City. Her work was dismissed, copied, and overlooked. Mostly by men she ultimately outlasted.
Kusama is famous for her vibrant polka dot motifs, immersive infinity mirror rooms, and iconic pumpkin sculptures.
Her artworks are colorful and joyful. But they also explore intense themes of infinity, self-obliteration, and hallucination. They reflect a deeply personal vision shaped by the artist’s own tortured psyche.
Kusama is a very serious artist. But she was also a master of self-promotion … long before it was trendy.
She wrote manifestos, designed her own clothing, and inserted herself into conversations where no one had asked her to be. She made people pay attention, even when they didn’t want to.
In the end, she got the last laugh. Kusama became one of the most important artists to emerge from the 1960s and a total art world superstar.
Her bold, obsessive style captured the attention of the public and major fashion houses like Louis Vuitton.
I’ve always loved her work and have read everything I could find about her, including her own autobiography.
So what makes her so compelling? For me, it’s the curious mix of personal struggle, creative restlessness, and total commitment to her vision.
She’s an enigma—the showman and the hermit, the outsider and the icon, the selfie magnet and the disciplined painter.
Plus, there’s a certain wildness to her and an absolute belief in her own destiny, which makes her story impossible to ignore.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through a short biography of Kusama, highlight her most famous artworks, and tell you where you can see them.
Mini Biography of Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929. She grew up in Matsumoto, a city in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture. Her family was wealthy and conservative, and her childhood was anything but peaceful.
From a young age, Kusama experienced vivid hallucinations and obsessive visions. She describes her childhood as “toxic.”
Her mother asked her to spy on her father during his affairs. That left deep emotional scars and a lasting aversion to sex.
Kusama once said she was “menaced by obsessions that crawl through my body.” Her hallucinations were intense—flashes of light, endless dots, and distorted surroundings. She’s openly said that, without art, she might not have survived.
Desperate to escape Japan, Kusama began searching for a way out. She wrote to Georgia O’Keeffe, who encouraged her to come to the U.S. That gave Kusama the push she needed to begin the long, difficult path to becoming an artist.
In 1957, at 27 years old, Kusama sewed money into her coat and left Japan for New York City via Seattle. She arrived with big dreams but little support, often living in harsh conditions and barely scraping by.
In New York, she began exploring repetition, patterns, and the themes that obsessed her.
She staged provocative performances called “Naked Happenings” or “Body Festivals,” where she painted polka dots on nude bodies as a way to protest and express herself.
To her credit, Kusama has always been open about her anxiety and mental health issues. She often gave her works offbeat, personal titles—like I Who Have Taken an Antidepressant.
Her breakthrough came with her Infinity Net paintings. These massive black canvases are covered in delicate white loops that seemed to go on forever. The act of painting them was calming, a way to ease her mind through repetition.
She also pushed boundaries with her soft sculpture installations, like the Accumulation and Aggregation series. At the time, no one had seen anything like it.
Her work came before Pop Art and Minimalism. In fact, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg had no problem stealing her ideas.
Even her infinity mirror rooms were copied. Kusama showed her first one at the Castellane Gallery in 1965. A few months later, Lucas Samaras showed a mirrored installation of his own at the much more famous Pace Gallery.
It was a sudden shift in his style. Kusama was devastated and threw herself from her apartment window.
Kusama earned praise from critics, but never got the recognition she truly deserved. Real success kept slipping away in the male-dominated art world with a racism problem.
In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan. in 1977, after several nervous breakdowns, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. She chose to live there permanently to manage her mental health.
It may have seemed like a strange decision, but it worked. Her studio is right across the street.
Kusama finally found fame later in life by staying weird. In the late 1990s, the art world suddenly “rediscovered” Kusama and she became an overnight sensation.
She was exactly what the market wanted at that moment. She an artist with a unique vision, a fascinating backstory, and instantly recognizable artwork.
Her trademark polka dots and playful pumpkins were perfect for drawing camera-ready crowds and easy to market. Kusama further honed her brand by wearing a signature orange wig and polka dot dresses.
Today, Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms are Instagram sensations. And she’s been dubbed the “Princess of Polka Dots.”
In 2001, at age 72, Kusama wrote her autobiography. It’s highly readable and gives you keen insight into private imagination, creativity, and mental anguish.
In 2017, Kusama established a museum dedicated to her work in Tokyo. It’s small, but has a cross section of her major works from Kusama’s earlier years to the present day.
Today, at 96, Kusama is more financially and critically successful than ever. And she’s still plugging away with her art, nearly every day.
She’s the most famous living artist in the world, a sweet bit of revenge all in all.
Famous Kusama Artworks
Infinity Mirror Rooms
Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms are by far her most famous and in-demand works. They put her on the map and made her a household name. She started owning Instagram with them in 2016–17, and hasn’t let go since.
Visitors often wait in line for hours just to step inside one for just a single minute. And once you’re in, it’s easy to see why.
These installations are fully immersive experiences, however short-lived. Born from Kusama’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies and vivid hallucinations, the rooms are a way for her to bring her inner world into physical space.
Instead of painting what she sees in her mind, she builds it around you. Then she invites you to step inside and experience it for yourself.
Her early infinity mirror rooms were relatively simple. Some were filled with polka dots, others with her soft, stuffed sculptures.
But over time, the rooms became more complex, dazzling, and photogenic, especially with the addition of mirrors and thousands of glowing LED lights.
The effect is hypnotic. Reflections stretch out in every direction, creating the illusion of infinite space.
For Kusama, these rooms were deeply personal. She described them as a place where you could see yourself multiply into infinity, disappearing into a vast, repeating field.
To her, it felt like “cloistering yourself in another world.” For visitors, it’s a fleeting, dreamlike escape and a rare chance to glimpse the world through Kusama’s eyes.
Here’s where you can find Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms, though they do travel around a lot for exhibitions:
- The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away
- 📍The Broad – Los Angeles, CA
One of Kusama’s most popular rooms. It’s an immersive black room filled with hanging LED lights and mirrors that create the illusion of endless space.
- Phalli’s Field
- 📍Hirshhorn Museum – Washington, D.C.
This is one of Kusama’s earliest infinity rooms. It’s filled with repeating soft sculptures of white phallic forms covered in red dots.
- The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away
- 📍Hirshhorn Museum – Washington, D.C.
This is a dark, mirrored space filled with tiny, color changing LED lights suspended from the ceiling, creating an endless field of stars.
- Infinity Dots Mirrored Room
- Repetitive Vision
- 📍Mattress Factory – Pittsburgh, PA
This is one of the lesser known rooms, but well worth a visit if you’re a Kusama fan in Pittsburgh. Infinity Dots is dark with lights and polka dots on the floor and ceiling. In Repetitive Vision, three white painted female mannequins, also covered in orange dots, stand amidst their reflections.
- Let’s Survive Forever
- 📍Art Gallery of Ontario – Toronto, Canada
A mirrored space filled with hanging chrome orbs and reflective spheres on the floor.
- My Heart Is Dancing Into the Universe
- 📍National Gallery of Victoria – Melbourne, Australia
This room features mirrored walls, hanging spheres, and vibrant polka dots.
- Dots Obsession
- 📍Les Abattoirs – Toulouse, France
A recent permanent addition featuring Kusama’s signature red and white polka dot motif in an immersive mirrored space.
- Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love
- 📍San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
This recent installation surrounds visitors with glowing, color shifting orbs reflected endlessly in mirrored walls. Kusama described it as a meditation on love, interconnectedness, and the fragile beauty of our planet.
Infinity Net Paintings
Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings are large scale canvases filled with endless, hand painted loops and mesh-like patterns.
These works were groundbreaking. They bridged the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
Kusama never aligned herself with any one movement. She was determined to create her own art revolution, and she succeeded.
Painted with obsessive focus and near mechanical precision, the delicate white or monochrome marks on these paintings float over a single colored background. The effect is rhythmic, meditative, and seemingly infinite.
The Infinity Nets reflect Kusama’s inner world—her anxiety, her need for control, and her desire to lose herself in repetition. Each one is a quiet act of self-erasure, dissolving the boundary between artist and canvas.
She once described these works as “white nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness.”
Several museums around the world house Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings, including:
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – New York City, USA
- Whitney Museum of American Art – New York City, USA
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden – Washington, D.C., USA
- Tate Modern – London, United Kingdom
- Art Institute of Chicago – Chicago, USA
- National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo – Tokyo, Japan
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art – Los Angeles, USA
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – San Francisco, USA
- Centre Pompidou – Paris, France
Pumpkin Sculptures
Kusama has had a lifelong interest in pumpkins. She finds them generous, unpretentiousness, and appealing.
She started with one pumpkin at a time, sometimes focusing on it for a month.
When Kusama returned to Japan, she began covering her pumpkins with polka dots. They’re surprisingly sophisticated and likable.
When she was invited to join the Venice Biennale in 1993, she decided to create an infinity room with pumpkins.
She created an immersive room with black-on-yellow polka dot pumpkin patterns and invited visitors to look inside an endless pumpkin patch. It was a huge hit.
Kusama’s pumpkins sculptures are now all over the world. Her most famous ones are in Naoshima Island in Japan.
In the United States, you can see them at the Hirshshorn Museum, The Broad, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla.
These spotty gems almost destroyed Instagram in 2016.
Narcissus’ Garden
Kusama created this piece for the 1966 Venice Biennale, though she wasn’t officially invited. She crashed the event, setting up her installation just outside the Italian Pavilion on a grassy lawn.
The work featured 1,500 small mirrored spheres arranged in a neat grid across the grass. Titled Narcissus Garden, it was both beautiful and subversive.
Dressed in a gold kimono, Kusama stood among the spheres and invited visitors to buy one for $2 each, telling them, “Your narcissism is for sale.”
It was part performance, part protest. Like Warhol’s soup cans, the piece blurred the line between high art and mass production. But where Warhol embraced the celebrity machine, Kusama’s message was sharper.
She was calling out vanity, the art market, and the culture of self-obsession, decades before selfie culture made it all feel prophetic.
Narcissus Garden questioned what art is worth and who gets to sell it. It was a bold move from an outsider artist who had already been ignored, dismissed, and copied.
Venice tried to shut it down. But the message had already landed.
Accumulation Series
Kusama began her famous Accumulation series in the 1960s, shortly after the Infinity Net paintings. She never really stopped making these strange, obsessive creations.
The Accumulations are sculptures made from furniture and other ordinary objects. They’re often covered with soft, stuffed forms (usually phallic shapes), painted white, and clustered so thickly that the original object nearly disappears. It’s as if the piece has been overtaken by aliens.
Accumulation No. 1 was the first and most iconic in the series. Kusama used it to express her anxiety around sex, the female body, and domestic life. She took a plain chair and turned it into something both humorous and unsettling.
Not long after she showed the piece in New York, Claes Oldenburg began making his own soft sculptures of everyday things. Kusama believed he took the idea from her without giving credit. According to her, his wife later apologized on both of their behalf.
Aggregation Series
Kusama’s Aggregation series is closely related to her Accumulation works. Both feature soft, stuffed forms obsessively repeated across everyday objects. But there’s a key difference.
While Accumulations focused on single items, like chairs or clothing, Aggregations expanded into full environments. They were bigger, more immersive, and often involved multiple components.
One of the most famous pieces from this series is a rowboat covered in hundreds of soft, white phallic forms. It was Kusama’s first significant installation.
The boat sits in a gallery space wallpapered with repeated black-and-white images of that very same boat, creating a dizzying sense of repetition.
Two white high heels are placed inside the boat—silent, strange, and a little eerie. The piece taps directly into Kusama’s deep psychological fears, especially her discomfort with the male body.
Not long after she created this work, Andy Warhol debuted his own wallpaper series.
Cow Wallpaper used the same idea of repeating imagery across walls. Kusama later accused him of copying her concept without giving her credit.
And honestly? She might have had a point. Entitled jerk!
Polka Dot Installations
Kusama’s polka dot installations are some of her most iconic and joyful works. And they go far beyond just her infinity mirror rooms.
Kusama uses polka dots as a visual language for infinity, self-obliteration, and the merging of self with the universe. To her, a single dot represents both the cosmos and the self.
Her dots are undeniably stylish and eye-catching. But they’re also layered.
They deal with themes of identity, the body, space, and infinity. Kusama famously said: “Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity.”
Kusama has used polka dots to cover just about everything: pumpkins, flowers, walls, floors, entire rooms, and even people’s bodies.
One of her most famous works is the Obliteration Room, a completely white space where visitors are given colorful dot stickers to place anywhere they like. Over time, the room becomes entirely covered, disappearing under a sea of spots.
Her Dots Obsession series is another signature polka dot project. It features giant inflatable spheres, often suspended in galleries or outdoor spaces, all covered in polka dots. Mirrors are sometimes added to create endless reflections and heighten the sense of immersion.
She’s even brought her dots to fashion and architecture. In her 2022 collaboration with Louis Vuitton, stores around the world were transformed with giant 3D polka dots and inflatable Kusama figures covering the facades.
My Eternal Soul Series
Kusama began this series in 2009 and has never stopped. She originally intended to create 200 paintings. But now she’ll well over 500 and still counting.
It’s a completely different style than her preceding work. The paintings are joyful and a bit like peasant art. They show that Kusama is a master colorist.
Some of them are intertwined with infinity nets. But most have the symbolism of Kusama’s obsessions — circles and ovals that look like paramecium or eyes.
The surfaces shift and slither. They’re unfiltered and irreverent.
When displayed, sometimes they’re stacked together covering entire walls. This gives the effect of one of her infinity mirror rooms.
They’re not all great. But they have a freer, more expressive bent than her earlier historically sanctioned Infinity Net paintings.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to Yayoi Kusama’s iconic masterpieces. You may find these other art guides interesting:
- famous Andy Warhol artworks
- famous Picasso paintings
- famous Matisse paintings
- famous Chagall paintings
- famous Kahlo paintings
- famous paintings in the United States
- famous paintings in Europe
- famous paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
- famous paintings by Raphael
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