Yayoi Kusama: The Woman Who Decided Her Own Terms at 28 and Has Kept Them for Seventy Years

Yayoi Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric facility since 1977 while becoming the most commercially successful female artist in history. Here is what it looks like to live entirely on your own terms for a lifetime.

HER

Will

6/20/20263 min read

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yayoi kusama louis vuitton art

Her | FlyAssLife

Since 1977, Yayoi Kusama has lived in a psychiatric institution in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

This is not involuntary. She chose it. She checked herself in, established a routine — wake, take meals, walk to her studio across the street, make art for ten to twelve hours, return to the facility, sleep — and has maintained that routine, with the discipline of a monasticism she designed herself, for nearly fifty years.

She is ninety-seven (97) years old. She still goes to the studio every day. She is the most commercially successful female artist in history, with auction records that regularly exceed ten million dollars per work. She has never needed the world's permission to be exactly what she is.

The Hallucinations

Kusama began experiencing visual hallucinations as a child in Matsumoto, Japan. The flowers on the tablecloth spoke to her. The dots on the fabric multiplied until they covered everything in the room, the walls, the ceiling, her own hands. She responded the way an artist responds to overwhelming visual experience: she drew what she saw.

The compulsive repetition — dots, nets, flowers, the same marks accumulated across surfaces until the accumulation became something beyond pattern — was not a stylistic choice. It was, initially, a psychological response to experience she couldn't otherwise process. The art was therapeutic before it was aesthetic, and it became aesthetic precisely because it was therapeutic: the sincerity of necessity rather than the calculation of style.

She understood this about herself early. In her autobiography, she describes making art as a way of obliterating the self that was overwhelmed by the visions — of losing the boundary between Kusama and the pattern until she could exist in it rather than be consumed by it. The infinity rooms are the physical realization of this: spaces in which the viewer experiences something approaching what Kusama experiences looking at a tablecloth.

New York, the 1960s, and the Career That Almost Wasn't

Kusama arrived in New York in 1957 with two hundred dollars and a letter of introduction to Georgia O'Keeffe that she had written herself. She was twenty-eight, had been painting obsessively since childhood, and had decided — with the specific certainty of someone who has no alternative — that New York was where she needed to be.

The 1960s art scene she arrived in was dominated by men — de Kooning, Warhol, Oldenburg — who took her ideas, in several documented cases, and presented them under their own names. Kusama's soft sculpture predated Oldenburg's by years. Her infinity net paintings preceded the minimalists who would later receive credit for similar approaches. She was there first, she was documented, and she was a Japanese woman in a world that had limited interest in crediting Japanese women.

She kept working.

The Return and the Triumph

Kusama returned to Tokyo in 1973, checked herself into the psychiatric facility in 1977, and from that contained and chosen life produced the body of work that has since made her the most exhibited living artist in the world. The infinity rooms — mirrored chambers filled with suspended lights that multiply into apparent endlessness — have generated queues around city blocks on every continent. The yellow pumpkins with black dots have become among the most recognized images in contemporary art.

The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in 2017, a five-story building dedicated entirely to her work, capacity deliberately limited to maintain the quality of engagement she considers necessary. She designed the programming.

She was still going to the studio across the street every day at ninety-five. Still working. Still living on the terms she set for herself in 1977 and has not deviated from since.

Most people spend their lives trying to figure out what their terms are. Kusama decided hers at twenty-eight, built a structure to protect them, and has had the freedom of that structure ever since.

That is not confinement. That is the most deliberate life available.

Her is FlyAssLife's ongoing feature. One woman. One story. Accomplished, magnetic, and entirely her own.