Yayoi Kusama: From Scandal and Shame to National Icon

When Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August, aged 97, Japan mourned one of its most celebrated cultural figures. But it has not always embraced her so readily.

For decades, sections of the country’s media and cultural establishment portrayed her as scandalous, shameful and mentally unstable; only after she achieved international acclaim was she recast at home as a national icon.

Her death, less than a month before a major retrospective of her work was due to open at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on 11 September, invites us to examine not only her extraordinary rise, but the society and institutions that first rejected her and then claimed her success. Her canonisation in Japan was not simply a matter of belated recognition; it was also shaped by the validation she received abroad.

Today, Japan remembers Kusama with grief and reflection. Much of that response has focused on the extraordinary trajectory of her career: from her emergence as an avant-garde artist in the 1950s and 1960s through the record-breaking exhibitions of her later years to her recognition as one of the world's most renowned artists, the "Polka Dot Queen."

Infinity Mirrored Room – The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will  Eternally Cover the Universe, 2025. Mixed media, detail. Foto: Peter Tijhuis. ©  YAYOI KUSAMA

Yet, as a Japanese writer, telling her life simply as a story of global success feels reductive, especially because sections of the Japanese press and cultural establishment long saw her as a disreputable and inflammatory figure. That attitude shifted alongside her growing acclaim in the international art world. She went from being labelled as the "queen of scandal" in some sections in the press to a celebrated cultural icon.

“I am deeply moved. I hope you will continue to witness how Yayoi Kusama has lived her life,” Kusama said at her award ceremony for the Order of Culture in 2016. “I have devoted my entire life to bringing my art to as many people as possible. I sincerely ask for your continued support of Yayoi Kusama.”

In her speech, Kusama used the word ikizama (生き様), which translates reductively as “way of life” but carries a deeper meaning in Japanese culture. It suggests the manner in which a person has lived their life as a pure expression of character, conviction and values. Kusama was not merely asking the audience to applaud her career. She was asking them to recognise the actions that defined her person: the defiance, persistence and commitment to her practice that had carried her from outsider status in Japan to an outsider in America to, ultimately, extraordinary cultural recognition in both.

The phrase also carries weight because her story is intertwined with broader questions about Japanese society and culture: the postwar cultural landscape, its complex relationship with the West and often dissonant attitudes towards mental illness, nudity, sexuality and political expression.

Yayoi Kusama around the age of ten, ca. 1939. © YAYOI  KUSAMA

Kusama was born in 1929 in the rural town of Matsumoto, into a prosperous family that ran a seed nursery. Materially comfortable, the household was nevertheless deeply unhappy. Kusama later recalled a volatile relationship between her parents, including her father’s affairs, which her mother forced her to witness, while her ambition to become an artist met fierce resistance at home. Beyond the family, her childhood coincided with economic crisis, the accelerating militarisation of Japanese society and, ultimately, a devastating and uniquely violent war with America which wrought havoc on her homeland. As a schoolgirl during the Second World War, she was mobilised to work in a factory sewing parachutes.

Around the age of 10, Kusama began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, including seeing the world covered in polka dots. To cope with the fear and complex emotions they brought, she started drawing.

After finishing high school, she left her hometown for Kyoto to receive formal training in traditional Nihonga painting. But she was drawn to a rawer and more transgressive form of expression, one that was neither understood nor welcomed by Japan's conventional art world. Seeking a place where she could work freely and pursue her artistic vision, she left for New York alone in 1958, just shy of her 30th birthday.

Kusama's life in New York was far from comfortable. She quickly exhausted her savings and struggled to afford food, often prioritising canvases and paint over basic comforts. She sometimes scavenged on the streets of Brooklyn for discarded meals. Yet she was also absorbed into New York’s bohemian circles, moving among experimental galleries, artists and performers and, by the late 1960s, the countercultural world of anti-war protest, sexual liberation and avant-garde expression. 

Her ikizama was perhaps at its height in 1966. Although Kusama was not officially selected to participate in that year’s Venice Biennale, she travelled to Venice and staged Narcissus Garden on the lawn outside the Italian Pavilion, with the support of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana. The work consisted of around 1,500 mirrored plastic spheres, which Kusama, dressed in a gold kimono, offered to visitors for 1,200 lire each under a sign declaring “Your Narcissism for Sale”. Biennale officials eventually stopped her from selling them. It was an audacious act of self-insertion into an international art establishment that had not invited her. Twenty-seven years later, she would return to Venice as Japan’s officially selected representative.

Yayoi Kusama amid her installation Narcissus Garden at the 33rd Venice Biennale, 1966. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner. © YAYOI KUSAMA

Bit by bit, New York’s commercial gallery sector gave her a platform on which to express her art. By the early 1970s, she was a visible and acclaimed figure on the scene. But, by this same time, she was struggling with an unrelenting depression.

She returned to Japan in 1973. Without a close support network to sustain her emotionally or financially, she had become increasingly isolated. Her return to her homeland was made even harder by the reception of her earlier New York performances, the "Happenings," in which she body-painted naked performers who embraced one another as an act of protest during the Vietnam War. The Japanese press seized on these performances as scandalous and erratic, reflecting the stigma surrounding nudity and sexuality in sections of Japanese society.

Kusama eventually found a place she could call home in a psychiatric hospital in 1977, where she continued to paint. It became her way of surviving. She spent years in relative obscurity, seen as an eccentric outsider. Mental illness has long carried a particular stigma in Japan, especially when it is not immediately visible, and even the act of seeking therapy has often been treated as a source of private shame. It’s a stigma I can attest still hadn’t disappeared when I was growing up in Kyoto in the 2010s.

The reversal began overseas. A revival of interest in Kusama's work in the late 1980s, anchored by exhibitions in New York, prefigured her selection to represent Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale. By 2016, she had received numerous domestic awards and was recognised as one of the country's most important cultural figures, including receiving the Order of Culture, one of Japan's highest honours.

That shift also points to a wider phenomenon known as gyakuyunyu, or "reverse import", whereby a Japanese figure or cultural product gains recognition at home only after being validated abroad. The phenomenon has even been discussed within Japan’s Council for Cultural Affairs. At a 2022 meeting of its Culture and Economy Subcommittee, Hiroyuki Shimatani, then director of the Kyushu National Museum, argued that Japan was characterised by "reverse imports", with people who succeed overseas subsequently gaining recognition at home. Kusama's trajectory is a particularly striking example.

Yayoi Kusama (centre) appearing in a kimono at the opening of Nul in 1965. Photograph by André Morain and Ad Petersen (montage). Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, courtesy 0-INSTITUTE.

Can we say that Japanese society has finally caught up with Kusama? Looking at Japan's contemporary art scene and social attitudes today, the answer is unclear. Many of the forms of expression that made Kusama controversial, including politically sensitive subjects such as feminine sexuality, remain contentious.

The 2019 controversy surrounding “Freedom of Expression?” at the Aichi Triennale is one of the clearest examples. More recently, a law criminalising the desecration of Japan’s national flag, passed in July, has raised concerns about restrictions on freedom of expression. The question of whether “politics should be kept out of art” continues to resurface, with artists and institutions facing criticism whenever their work touches on politically sensitive subjects.

So what has changed in the way Kusama’s work is seen? Gyakuyunyu provides at least part of the answer. Recognition abroad helped change the way domestic institutions, critics and audiences were prepared to understand her. What had once been treated as defamatory, excessive or embarrassing could later be reframed as evidence of originality, ambition and international significance.

The same dynamic can be seen more broadly in Japanese contemporary art. Takashi Murakami, whose own career followed a similarly international trajectory, has repeatedly argued that Japanese artists historically struggled to gain international standing because they did not understand the unwritten rules, or context, of the Western art world. As a result, Japanese audiences often struggled to understand what artists like him were doing.

Within some sections of the Japanese cultural scene, there has also been a tendency to place greater emphasis on works whose aesthetic appeal or technical accomplishment is immediately apparent. This is not limited to the general public; it can also be seen within parts of the art world less exposed to Western contemporary art discourse. Western contemporary art can be understood primarily as “free self-expression” or “beauty of sensibility,” while questions about what an artwork contributes to art history can be overlooked.

This is not a question of one set of values being superior to another, but of a particular dynamic within Japan’s cultural scene: artists like Murakami and Kusama, whose work was recognised within a specific conceptual and historical context, can be reduced to a recognisable style and the status of cultural icons. Seeing them become celebrated nationally after having once been criticised or dismissed feels, frankly, deeply odd.

Art critic and curator Noi Sawaragi argued in the 1990s that this problem was rooted in the very formation of modernity in Japan. In the 1998 text ‘日本・現代・美術’ (Japan/Modern/Art), he traces it back to the way postwar Japanese art adopted the style and vocabulary of the "avant-garde" under very different historical conditions from those in the West. Japan imported the language of the avant-garde without having the same foundations that those methods were designed to challenge.

Anatomic Explosion happening on the Brooklyn Bridge,  New York, August 14, 1968. Getty Research Institute, Los  Angeles. Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender. Photo: Shunk-Kender ©  J. Paul Getty Trust

Kusama navigated all of this without an established route for a Japanese woman artist to follow. She believed in her own character, effort, instinct and vision, defied a cultural establishment that had little place for it, and made her way to New York, where she became a prominent figure in the world's most competitive art scene, despite all the stereotypes and exoticisation she must have faced as an independent Japanese woman in the West. We should not reduce her life to a handful of Instagrammable, easily consumed images.

What Kusama leaves behind is not only an impressive body of work, but a record of postwar Japan's cultural mood and of the contemporary art scene's deep entanglement with Western structures of recognition. Her career shows how international acclaim could change the way domestic institutions, critics and audiences were prepared to see an artist they had once dismissed.

That her life has opened a space for this conversation to take place beyond academia, in the wider English-language public sphere, may be one of her most significant legacies.