Image: Towada Art Center, Towada
The Towada Art Center in Towada, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, has issued a statement mourning the death of Yayoi Kusama, whose permanent work ‘Love Forever, Singing in Towada’ has been installed in the city since 2010. Director Sachiko Shikata described the news of the artist’s death as sudden, wrote that she was shocked and deeply saddened, and offered her condolences.
The statement was published on August 27 by Sachiko Shikata, the center’s director. Kusama’s work, catalogued by the museum in English as ‘Love Forever, Singing in Towada’ (2010), occupies the Art Square across from the government avenue. According to the center, the colorful installation has been loved by local residents and visitors for many years.
The museum characterized Kusama as an avant-garde artist of global importance whose work nonetheless reached an unusually broad public. It pointed to the vivid colors and polka-dot motifs that became closely associated with her practice, as well as the public recognition of Kusama herself. The center said these elements have brought energy to viewers and made the artist an object of admiration for people in Japan and internationally.
In its account of Kusama’s career, the museum recalled that she began drawing with dots and nets while experiencing hallucinations and auditory disturbances during childhood. After moving to the United States in 1957, she encountered discrimination related to her origins as a person from a defeated postwar Japan, as an Asian person and as a woman, the statement said. The experience, according to the museum, coincided with a sharpening of her avant-garde practice and growing critical recognition.
Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and established a way of working while receiving treatment. She continued to develop her art as well as writing novels, with the distinctiveness of her work and public presence becoming widely recognized in Japan and abroad from the 1990s onward. The Towada Art Center presented her career as one that challenged social conventions, prejudice and discrimination, particularly from a perspective significant to women seeking freedom from imposed expectations.
The museum also emphasized the connection between Kusama’s sustained production and her ability to endure illness and other difficulties. It described her repeated drawing of dots and nets as an activity inseparable from living, and her resulting works as obsessive yet liberating, radically experimental yet marked by pop energy. The center said that her work carried persistent messages of love and peace.
For Towada, ‘Love Forever, Singing in Towada’ is both a permanent landmark and a gift to the city’s residents and its visitors, the statement said. Shikata added a personal recollection of meeting Kusama in 1985, when Shikata organized the Radical Art Prize while working on art programming at a Harajuku fashion building with Kusama taking part as a judge. The memorial statement was dated August 27, 2026, at 2 p.m.
