Vale Yayoi Kusama: The Asexual Icon Who Cast Her Dreams & Fears In Steel

Japanese Artist Yayoi Kusama — famous for her infinity rooms, eclectic pumpkin sculptures, and her love of polka dots — has died at the age of 97. The avant-garde sculptor, painter, and visionary passed away at a hospital in Tokyo on 14 August, according to an announcement made on her official website.

“It is with profound sorrow that we acknowledge the passing of Yayoi Kusama,” the announcement read. “Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry.

“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul. We will carry forward Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world.”

Kusama was born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929. Experiencing hallucinations from a young age, the artist channelled her physic terrain into art, inspiring her first polka-dot and net-themed drawings, which she ultimately developed into her distinct and internationally-acclaimed sculptorial practice. 

Today, Kusama’s body of work is perhaps most recognised for her repetition or “accumulation” of simple motifs, like the circles that dot her pumpkins, mirror rooms, and even the thousands of soft-form phallices she patiently sewed into rooms floors, walls, chairs, and even two rowboats.

Yayoi Kusama Was An LGBTQ+ Legend

As for her significance to the LBGTQ+ community, Kusama will be remembered for fearlessly identifying as asexual. Rather than hide her identity or pander to a zeitgeist that rendered sex both essential and taboo — or that rendered women as silent objects for erotic consumption  — Kusama made no secret of her complex relationship with sex, treating it as an object of aversion, artistic inquiry, protest, and even using it as a tool. 

Early in her career, Kusama hosted a number of public orgies, or ‘happenings’, featuring body paint and her trademark polka dots. Her appropriation of sex as a form of protest even extended to offering President Richard Nixon sex in exchange for a ceasefire in the Pacific, an offer she made casually in 1968.

Though today she is largely remembered by the world as the iconic “Princess of Polka Dots”, for the queers, it is her unapologetic advocacy for asexuality and her commitment to being loud, weird, and outrageously herself that we honour.