An Artist of Infinity | Remembering Yayoi Kusama 1929-2026

Yayoi Kusama was one of the best-known and most influential artists of her time, as instantly recognisable for her personal style, her watchful gaze and vividly colored page-boy fringe as she was for the polka dots and pumpkins that populate her vivid output as an artist. She died in hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, and her death was announced, on August 27, 2026, by the Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation.

Her Infinity Mirror Rooms, the earliest of which dates back to 1965, form a distinctive contribution to millennia of engagement with optics by scientists, astronomers, and artists. These spaces became over the past two decades, in the age of the smartphone, a natural backdrop for a natively digital generation, trained in the ways of Instagram, to locate itself. 

That cultural phenomenon, born of the selfie culture that grew up in the 2010s, is captured in a work such as Operator’s On View (2019) commissioned by SCAD Museum of Art, in Savannah, Georgia; a work whose museum statement describes it as examining “ how art experiences generate in today’s audiences the wish for themselves to be its subject”. The connection to the reach of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms is drawn by Dejha Ti and Ania Catherine of Operator in an interview published by Right Click Save in 2023, in which they describe On View as “our way of analyzing selfie culture from the perspective of artists whose practice was being co-opted by experiential marketing”.

David Zwirner, who had been one of Kusama’s gallerists since 2011, said in a statement published following her death that her art “influenced the histories of minimalism, pop art, and performance art; more recently her large-scale installations single-handedly pioneered what is now referred to as experiential art.” That experiential genre, largely founded on Kusama’s Infinity Mirror rooms, had given rise by the early 2020s to an identifiable type of immersive institution which is represented by spaces such as the teamLab group, Sphere Las Vegas, Outernet London, Refik Anadol Studio’s recently opened Dataland museum of AI arts, Los Angeles, and the upcoming UBS Digital Art Museum, Hamburg.

It could be argued that Kusama’s contribution to experiential art, through her Infinity Mirror Rooms, has changed the way art institutions approach the challenge of attracting, and bringing together, audiences from across generations.

It is telling that Tate Modern should have shown two of Kusama’s infinity spaces for close to three years (May 2021 to April 2024): Infinity Mirrored Room — Filled with the Brilliance of Life, originally created for the gallery’s retrospective of the artist in 2012, and Chandelier of Grief, 2016/2018.

Zwirner added in his statement that it had been “one of the great privileges of my professional life” to have been able to represent Kusama’s “extraordinary art”. “The last time Kusama visited New York, a city where she lived for many years, was in 2013. During that visit, she opened the first of many exhibitions in our galleries that had hour-long lines for the chance to experience her work. Her steadfast message of love and peace has now reached millions of admirers around the globe.”

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Yayoi Kusama; born Matsumoto, Japan, March 22, 1929; died Tokyo, August 14, 2026.