Yayoi Kusama died on August 14, 2026, in a Tokyo hospital.
She was 97 years old. The world did not find out until August 27, when her museum and foundation published a brief statement, without a cause of death, containing a single line that says it all: she kept painting until her final days.
She was born in 1929 into a well-to-do Japanese family that never understood what she saw on the walls when she was a child. Kusama had hallucinations from an early age: flowers that spoke to her, dots that covered everything she looked at. Instead of hiding them, she painted them.
In the late 1950s, she went to Seattle and then New York, alone, unable to speak English well, to enter an art scene dominated by men who did not want her there. She was a woman and she was Japanese. She stayed anyway.
From those hallucinations came her infinity nets, her giant pumpkins, and the mirror rooms where one loses oneself among thousands of polka dots repeated into infinity. In the 1960s, she organized body-painting performances against the Vietnam War.
She spent much of her life living by choice in a psychiatric hospital in Japan, and from there she continued creating without stopping.
In 2022, one of her paintings sold for 10.5 million dollars. In 2023, she covered the Champs-Élysées in polka dots alongside Louis Vuitton. In 2013, she was in Buenos Aires.
She turned what others might have called illness into a language the entire world understood. She left in silence. But she left the dots glowing.
