Remembering Yayoi Kusama, whose art transformed repetition, reflection and obsession into moments of unexpected calm.

At 97, artist Yayoi Kusama passed away on 14th August 2026 in Tokyo of multiple organ failure. The polka dots that made her the world's most visited living artist now belong only to history. My first encounter with her work was not within a museum but actually within a garden in London, at the pond at Victoria Miro, a contemporary art gallery in London, where a scattering of Kusama’s steel spheres titled the Narcissus Garden has drifted. I remember standing at the water's edge watching them knock gently against each other in the wind, and finding the whole thing, unexpectedly, therapeutic.

Valley Galley installation on Naoshima, Japan. Image by Von Chua.

Born on 22nd March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Kusama was the fourth child of a family that owned Nakatsutaya, a wholesale seed and plant nursery large enough to include its own greenhouse, a rarity in provincial Japan at the time. The business gave the family relative financial stability through the worst years of the Depression, and gave the young Kusama something else: fields of flowers to sketch daily, and by her own later account, the visual hallucinations - dots multiplying across a tablecloth, a pattern of violets addressing her by name - that would recur throughout her work for the next eighty years. Kusama’s family was conservative and unsupportive of her ambitions to be an artist, so the financial stability they had merely bought materials and eventually, an escape route for the young Kusama, but not permission.

Her first solo exhibitions were held locally, at Matsumoto's First Community Centre in 1952 showing 250 works in March, and a further 280 works in September. Kusama’s rate of production drew the attention of two psychiatrists, Shiho Nishimaru and Ryuzaburo Shikiba, who saw in the work something closer to compulsion than technique. Exactly when she sold her first piece is hard to pin down, but by 1955, she had already been included in a group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, three years before she ever set foot in New York.

Kusama left Japan in 1957, driven as much by family conflict as by ambition; her mother, who opposed to the art from the start, pressed money into her hand and told her never to set foot in the house again. Kusama burned the paintings she could not carry and arrived, first to Seattle, then to New York in 1958, with roughly two thousand works under her arm. It was not smooth sailing because of poverty, a market uninterested in a Japanese woman's work, and, later, the experience of watching her ideas travel through better-connected peers without credit.

As her health slowly declined, she returned to Japan in 1973. In 1977, she voluntarily admitted herself to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, from which she was never discharged; for close to five decades she lived there by choice, walking each morning to a studio across the street to work. “The only method I have found that relieved my illness,” she wrote, “is to keep creating art.” It is a rare thing for an artist's practice and their treatment plan to be, quite literally, the same short walk.

The work I keep returning to by Kusama is the Narcissus Garden, first staged on the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. 1,500 mass-produced plastic reflective spheres, which Kusama sold to passers-by for two dollars each, under a sign reading “Your Narcissium for Sale”. Because of this, Kusama was expelled before the week was out and did not exhibit at the Biennale again until 1993. The myth behind it is Ovid's: Narcissus, transfixed by his own reflection at the water's edge, drowning in it as he was unable to look away. Kusama's steel spheres perform the same trick on every visitor who leans over the pond, though the effect, in my experience, has been closer to calm than to warning.

More recently at the Galley in Naoshima, Japan, I saw a version of the Narcissus Garden again where 1,700 steel spheres drift across a pond and spill into the surrounding rocks as part of the Benesse House Museum grounds. The scale was different, the light was different, but the sensation was not. Both times I found myself simply stopping my footsteps to watch the steel spheres move - no reading required, no captions necessary, and mesmerising and almost meditative to watch. That, I think, is the rarer achievement of Yayoi Kusama’s artworks. Kusama's late fame may have been heavily skewed towards her brightly polka-dotted pumpkins and infinity mirror rooms, where they photograph particularly well, the Narcissus Garden instead, asks nothing of the viewer except to stand still and watch something drift. If you’re lucky enough to get a gust of wind blowing during a visit, the steel spheres also make a soft clinking sound. Kusama’s the Narcissus Garden has a purity to it, and a sense of joy, that make it genuinely ageless - a child would enjoy it as much as I did, for entirely different reasons. For the joyful artworks that Kusama has put out into the world, thank you.