Yayoi Kusama’s global fame did not remake the art world

By Tom Whitfield

Yayoi Kusama died in Tokyo on 14 August, aged 97, after becoming one of the most recognisable artists on the planet.

The Japanese artist arrived in New York in 1958 as an outsider: female, Asian and largely unknown. Her dots and pumpkins moved from canvases and sculptures onto handbags and shopfronts. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms generated museum queues and millions of selfies.

Her visibility within structures that once excluded her remained extraordinary, according to Izumi Nakajima, who specialises in feminism and post-war Japanese art. Nakajima said Kusama’s global success carried enormous symbolic force. Individual achievement and structural transformation of gendered and geographical asymmetries, she argued, work on different registers. She said a canon can accommodate a few monumental women artists while continuing to marginalise many more. This distinction complicates Kusama’s image as a lone trailblazer for women and Asian artists.

Fame and structural change

Japan in the 1950s and early 1960s had a substantial cohort of women pursuing experimental practices, Nakajima said. Atsuko Tanaka and Hideko Fukushima were among them. Projecting Kusama’s present fame backward risks making her look uniquely radical from the outset.

Nakajima said Kusama’s departure from Japan in 1957 was crucial. During Japan’s high-growth era, women’s lives increasingly reorganised around domesticity. Kusama built her career abroad. Exhibitions, photographs, fashion, happenings and media coverage made both her art and herself visible.

Multiple Spirits, a feminist and queer publishing and research collective based in Tokyo and Vienna, said opportunities to encounter artists from different backgrounds have unquestionably expanded. The global art world Kusama entered was dominated overwhelmingly by white men. Yet values and measures shaped by that world remain insufficient. Success still rests on criteria inherited from it. The collective questioned whether Kusama’s trajectory should still serve as a model of success.

Nakajima also resists treating feminism as an attribute or categorical designation. She considers it a critical method for reading Kusama’s repetition, sexuality, self-representation and negotiation of the body.

Some feminist practices rejected Modernism’s claims to autonomy and universality. Kusama, by contrast, resisted confinement as either a woman or Japanese artist. Nakajima said she sought to occupy the position of the universal artistic subject that Modernism had imagined.

Multiple Spirits found a gap between Kusama’s international reception and her popular image in Japan. At home, audiences know her chiefly as the maker of colourful polka-dotted paintings and installations. The anti-war politics and sexual-liberty demands of her 1960s happenings receive less attention. The collective said those practices need reconsideration within the social and cultural conditions that produced them.

From provocateur to global brand

In 1966, Kusama appeared uninvited at the Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden. She sold mirrored spheres beneath a sign reading Your Narcissism for Sale. Decades later, those mirrors had become among contemporary art’s most coveted attractions.

Visitors waited hours to spend seconds inside an Infinity Mirror Room, usually holding a phone. Louis Vuitton collaborations made her dots a globally recognisable luxury motif. Critics have consequently cast Kusama as a precursor of the immersive artainment economy and one of its most successful brands. No attendance or revenue figures accompany that claim.

Hidenori Ota, founder of Ota Fine Arts and Kusama’s longtime representative in Japan, links that visibility to a struggle to be 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,” Ota said. Having directly experienced war, Kusama sought a language capable of reaching a mass audience. Ota said she repeatedly returned to love as a vehicle for criticism.

Kusama’s popularity also made mental illness unusually visible in mainstream contemporary art. She voluntarily lived at a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo from 1977 onward. She worked for decades at a nearby studio. She often connected compulsive repetition and artistic production with hallucinations and psychological distress, but generally avoided disability advocacy.

Critics say this encouraged the familiar mad genius narrative, in which illness becomes an emblem of triumph over adversity. It does little to address disability, psychiatric experience or accessibility. Nakajima warns that linking women’s creativity to illness, trauma and compulsion has helped them gain recognition. It has also restricted how their practices are understood.

Racism and the limits of inclusion

The most troubling part of Kusama’s legacy concerns 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. The 2011 English translation omitted other denigrating lines.

The comments regained attention before her 2023 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Kusama said she deeply regretted using hurtful and offensive language. She apologised for the pain she had caused.

Ota said the episode should not be reduced to the label racist. He argued that Kusama’s words should be examined against the social conditions and historical context of the time. He said this requires further debate and study.

The episode sits uneasily beside her later universal language of love. It also exposes the limits of making her an uncomplicated symbol of inclusion.

Ota rejects the idea that Kusama alone transformed Asia’s art world. He said the era’s larger shifts, particularly the social and economic rise of Asia, mattered more. In his account, Kusama moved in step with those changes.

Multiple Spirits said shrinking cultural budgets have pushed museums toward larger audiences and alternative funding. Kusama shows deliver dependable economic results. Her visibility, however, has not particularly helped other marginalised artists.

What does this change for artists working today?

Multiple Spirits says structural change cannot rest on the success story of a minority artist. It identifies less spectacular priorities:

• improving working conditions and accessibility
• using inclusive language
• protecting freedom of expression
• connecting efforts across institutions

Nakajima sets the limit on the celebratory version of Kusama’s legacy: “exceptional success and structural inequality can coexist.” Kusama changed who could occupy the centre of contemporary art, but not the nature of that centre.