Yayoi Kusama: Matsumoto’s Polka Dot Artist

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most widely recognized artists working today, known for her polka dots, net patterns, and mirror rooms. Her life has moved between three places: Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture, where she was born in 1929 and spent her childhood; New York, where she built her early career in the 1950s and 1960s; and Tokyo, where she has lived and worked since the 1970s.

The Matsumoto Years

Yayoi Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. Her family ran a plant nursery and seed farm, and she was one of four children. The business was established enough to give the family financial stability through the 1930s. She grew up around the greenhouses and flower fields, and began drawing the plants there as a young child.

Kusama has described experiencing hallucinations from an early age, often involving fields of dots and repeating patterns that seemed to spread across the surfaces around her. These visions became the basis of the motifs she would use for the rest of her career. By around age ten she was already making drawings covered in dots and nets.

Her interest in art met resistance at home, particularly from her mother, who wanted her to follow a conventional path. During the Second World War, her schooling was cut short under the National Mobilization Law, and she spent part of her teens working in a factory sewing parachutes.

In 1948 she left Matsumoto for Kyoto to study Nihonga, a formal style of traditional Japanese painting, at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. She found the training rigid and grew frustrated with its conventions. By the early 1950s she was holding solo exhibitions back in Matsumoto, including a 1952 show at the city’s First Community Centre that featured more than one hundred works.

The New York Years

In the mid-1950s, while still in Japan, Kusama wrote to the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, sending examples of her work and asking for advice. O’Keeffe replied and encouraged her to come to the United States. Kusama left Japan in 1957, going first to Seattle for an exhibition at the Zoë Dusanne Gallery. She arrived in New York in 1958.

Her early years in the city were difficult. She had little money, spoke little English, and worked in a cold studio. Within about a year she had her first New York solo exhibition, showing the Infinity Net paintings: large canvases covered edge to edge in small, repeated loops. Critics and other artists responded to them, and she became a recognized figure in the downtown avant-garde.

Through the 1960s she expanded into soft sculpture, collage, film, and installation, including the early mirror rooms that used reflection to create the impression of endless space. She also staged public performances, several of which involved painting polka dots on nude participants, and she organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Despite the attention, recognition and income did not follow consistently, and she watched several male contemporaries gain fame for work that echoed her own innovations. The lack of acknowledgement, financial strain, and the death of the artist Joseph Cornell, a close friend, contributed to her decision to leave. She returned to Japan in 1973.

The Tokyo Years

Kusama’s return to Japan was difficult. The art world there had largely forgotten her during her years abroad, and her work was often received with little interest. She was known in Japan mostly for her writing, which included novels and poetry. During this period she experienced a serious decline in her mental and physical health.

In 1977 she entered Seiwa Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Tokyo, and she has lived there voluntarily ever since. She set up a studio a short distance away and has continued to work from both places. Her output through these years was steady and broad, covering painting, sculpture, prints, and fiction.

Wider recognition returned slowly and then sharply. In 1993 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, becoming the first solo female artist to represent Japan in its national pavilion with a presentation built around a mirror room and polka-dot pumpkins. The exhibition renewed international interest in her earlier work and her career.

From the mid-2010s onward, her large-scale Infinity Mirror Rooms drew very large audiences at museums around the world, and the polka-dot pumpkin became one of the most widely recognized images in contemporary art. Kusama lived in the hospital and worked daily at her nearby studio in Tokyo until her death in August 2026, at age 97.

Yayoi Kusama’s Museums in Matsumoto and Tokyo

Two museums hold concentrations of Kusama’s work that connect directly to her life: the Matsumoto City Museum of Art in her home city, and the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, the city where she has lived and worked since the 1970s.

The Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo opened in 2017 in the Shinjuku area, in a building dedicated entirely to her work. It runs scheduled exhibitions drawn from her own collection and operates on timed-entry tickets bought in advance for set time slots, with a limited number of visitors admitted each day.

The Matsumoto City Museum of Art in Matsumoto City opened in April 2002 and reopened in April 2022 after about a year of renovation. It holds a permanent Kusama collection that runs from her early drawings through the mirror rooms and dotted installations, alongside rotating exhibitions and works by other artists tied to the region. One of her large flower sculptures stands outside the main entrance, and Kusama’s polka-dot design extends across parts of the building and its surroundings, including a bus that runs in the city.

Book your Yayoi Kusama Exhibition Tour in Matsumoto City with Locals

For visitors to Matsumoto, the Matsumoto City Museum of Art is the most direct way to see Kusama’s work in the place where it started. The motifs she is now known for internationally, the dots and repeating patterns, first appeared in drawings she made as a child in the city, among her family’s seed fields and greenhouses. The museum’s permanent collection traces that work from those early drawings through to her later installations, in the city where she was born and raised.

The Matsumoto Castle Tour & Yayoi Kusama Exhibition tour operated by Matsumoto Experience is the best way to explore the most iconic highlights of the city. By visiting both the castle and the museum, guests encounter a unique juxtaposition: the enduring legacy of feudal architecture and the contemporary creations of an international artistic icon, both of which are deeply tied to the history of this city.