Image: Yayoi Kusama in the installation space of the LOVE exhibition (2013), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo has published a statement mourning Yayoi Kusama, who has died at the age of 97. Signed by the museum's director, Mariko Kato, it appeared on the museum's news page and its official social-media account on 28 August 2026, in Japanese only; the museum's English site carries no version of it.
The statement describes Kusama as a leading Japanese contemporary artist who had an overwhelming presence around the world, and offers the museum's condolences. It recalls that she moved to the United States in 1957 and drew attention as an avant-garde artist, and that in 1993 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. From the 2000s onward, as art histories across different regions of the world were re-examined, her international standing rose sharply, and retrospectives at institutions including the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern consolidated both critical recognition and a wide popular following.
Kato also sets out the museum's own long association with the artist. Kusama took part in its 2003 opening exhibition, Happiness, in the 10th-anniversary exhibition LOVE in 2013 and in the group exhibition STARS in 2020, and the museum devoted a solo exhibition to her, KUSAMATRIX: Yayoi Kusama, in 2004. She was also the main artist of Roppongi Art Night in 2012, at the Roppongi Hills Arena.
The statement closes by citing a passage from Kusama's autobiography Infinity Net, in which she writes of polka dots and of the obliteration of herself, others and the universe. Kato writes that the artist now seems to have dissolved into infinite space as an eternal presence, and that her art and spirit will live on.
The museum gave no details of the circumstances of the death and did not announce a memorial, a commemorative exhibition or other related programming.
