Yayoi Kusama’s death in Tokyo on Aug. 14, at the age of 97, closes one of the longest and most consequential careers in contemporary art. It should also prompt an uncomfortable question for Japan: Why did an artist now treated as a national treasure have to leave the country before the scale of her achievement could be seen?
Kusama’s biography is often told as a sequence of triumphant images. The young woman from Matsumoto arrives in New York in 1957. The Infinity Net paintings establish a radical language of repetition. Soft sculptures, mirrored environments and anti-war happenings follow. In 1966, she presents Narcissus Garden — hundreds of mirrored spheres — beside the Venice Biennale without an official invitation. Decades later, pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms make her one of the world’s most recognizable living artists.
That arc is true, but its smoothness is deceptive. Kusama entered a postwar art world organized by inequalities of nationality, race, gender and institutional access. She was ambitious, strategic and astonishingly productive, yet recognition was neither immediate nor secure. Her ideas circulated in a New York scene dominated by men who were often better positioned to turn experimentation into canonical status.
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