Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025
Yayoi Kusama – Japanese artist who checked herself into a mental hospital — and never left — while becoming an international star
You can still visit her. Every morning, a black town car collects Yayoi Kusama from the psychiatric hospital in Shinjuku where she has voluntarily lived for nearly five decades. It drives her across Tokyo to a modest white building in Shinjuku’s backstreets — the Yayoi Kusama Studio, quiet except for the rhythmic shuffle of canvas, fabric, and assistants.
She steps out wearing a flaming red wig and clothes that look like they’ve been swallowed whole by a polka dot avalanche. She sits. She paints. Sometimes, she sculpts or writes poetry about obliteration, death, infinity. Then the car returns her to the hospital. Her bedroom is small. Monastic. A shrine to survival, perhaps. The room and the world have long since switched places.
Yayoi Kusama — the reigning queen of Japanese contemporary art, viral sensation of Instagram’s mirror-obsessed masses, high priestess of polka dots and pumpkins — is also, quite literally, a woman who institutionalized herself and never left. Somewhere between madness and mastery, she built a kingdom.
But Kusama’s story isn’t an art-world fairytale. It’s a riddle drawn in loops and dots, best read like a hallucination: slowly, reverently, and with a tinge of fear.
“These visions come to me.”
Kusama was born in 1929, the youngest child of a well-to-do family in Matsumoto, Japan — a mountainous town wrapped in mist and silence. Her childhood, as she tells it, was a private apocalypse. A brutal mother. A philandering father. And, most enduring of all, hallucinations.
She first saw the dots when she was around ten. A tablecloth covered in red flowers began to speak. The petals crawled off the fabric and onto her arms, her face, her everything. “I looked around and saw that everything in the room was covered with the same pattern,” she later said. “Even myself. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate.”
It terrified her. But it also became a kind of logic. An aesthetic grammar. Polka dots weren’t design — they were revelation.
She painted compulsively, furiously, hiding her sketches from her mother, who ripped them up whenever she found them. Her world was already dissolving. She drew to pin it in place.
Escape as art. Art as escape.
Kusama had no interest in becoming someone’s wife. She had no interest in becoming anyone’s anything, really, except herself — in her purest, most uncontainable form. In 1958, she escaped to New York with a few hundred dollars and a suitcase full of watercolor paintings. She was 29. Japanese. Female. Unknown. Practically allergic to English. But inside her beat the furious, radiant heart of someone who simply could not stop making.
New York, in the late '50s, was hard-edged and male and obsessed with action painting and bravado. Still, Kusama clawed her way in. First through quiet drawings of repetitive dots — works that anticipated what would become the minimalist and conceptual art movements. Then, bolder — massive, almost endless canvases she called “Infinity Nets.” The same mark repeated millions of times, like manic embroidery, like she was stitching the sky back together.
They were mesmerizing. Also obsessive. Also the only thing keeping her sane.
She shared a studio building with Donald Judd. Frank Stella came to see her work. Warhol came. Claes Oldenburg borrowed ideas. There’s a long, disputed thread through art history that traces American minimalism and pop art directly to Kusama’s early contributions. But she wasn’t in it for legacy. She was in it to survive.
“I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body,” she once wrote. “So I paint them.”
Nude happenings and mirrored rooms.
In the 1960s, Kusama changed her art — or maybe, more accurately, it began leaking into the streets. She became a performance artist, activist, provocateur. She staged “happenings” in Central Park, on Wall Street, in front of the MoMA — events where naked bodies were painted with dots, where sex was political, where the Vietnam War was condemned with psychedelic fervor.
She sent letters to Richard Nixon proposing they make love instead of war. She dressed herself in robes like a shaman and declared herself the “High Priestess of Polka Dots.” She opened a short-lived “Kusama Fashion Company.” She crashed Venice Biennale by installing a mirrored installation with hundreds of floating silver spheres in a garden, uninvited — an early prototype of what would become her most famous works: the Infinity Mirror Rooms.
By now, she was a star. And broke. And unraveling.
Kusama never really slept. She rarely ate. She was hounded by depression, paranoia, hallucinations. Her hallucinations didn’t lessen with fame — they got louder. The dots whispered. The pumpkins loomed. She attempted suicide more than once.
In 1973, she left America. Quietly. She told no one.
The disappearance. The return.
Back in Japan, Kusama entered a mental hospital. She checked herself in and, to this day, still lives there. For years, no one in the West knew what had become of her. She wrote surreal novels and painted every day in obscurity, with the same urgency and repetition.
And then the world changed its tune. In the '90s, Japan rediscovered her. Then the art world followed. Then came retrospectives, honors, biennales, museum shows. She represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 — officially this time. A global Yayoi Kusama revival surged like floodwater.
By the 2010s, Kusama was everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms — those glowing, surreal spaces filled with lights and endless reflection — became pilgrimage sites. Millennials and Gen Z queued for hours for 30 seconds inside. Instagram turned her into a celebrity. Critics compared her to Warhol, to Louise Bourgeois, to the Dalai Lama. Louis Vuitton made bags with her dots. Her work sold for tens of millions.
And through it all, she stayed exactly where she was. Hospital. Studio. Hospital. The rhythm of her life, like her paintings, a kind of mantra.
The paradox of Yayoi Kusama.
She is both the most visible and the most hidden artist of our time. She has made herself into a brand — and a ghost. She performs her madness for the public — and privately suffers it. She lives in a hospital — but creates work that draws ecstatic crowds. Her art is joyful and terrifying, innocent and nightmarish, minimalist and overwhelming.
“I want to live forever,” she’s said. And maybe she already has. Not in the traditional way. But in the image: a small woman with a red wig, surrounded by dots, quietly building a universe where the edges blur and everything — and everyone — starts to dissolve into the infinite.
In the end, the dots may outlive us.
Yayoi Kusama is 95 now. Still working. Still painting every day. Her newest exhibition in Tokyo draws tens of thousands. The mirror rooms continue to spawn replicas, clones, tributes. TikTok videos of floating lanterns and dotted walls rack up millions of views. The word “infinity” has never been more profitable — or more poetic.
But behind it all is a single woman. Alone in a small hospital room. Getting up each morning to ride in a car to her studio. Picking up her brush. Telling the dots where to go.
And somehow, after all this time, they still listen.