Yayoi Kusama in London

For the contemporary artist, Yayoi Kusama, it was not a certain smell, colour, or object that brought her back to a place of safety. It was shaped like a pumpkin. Kusama’s pumpkins are faithful to nature but exist in fantasy, appearing in red, yellow and green.

Kusama exhibited Mirror Room (Pumpkin) in the Japanese Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

“I love pumpkins because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality. My desire to create works of pumpkins still continues. I have enthusiasm as if I were still a child.” Yayoi Kusama

The pumpkin first appeared in Kusama’s school work in 1946. It was an example of Nihonga, a Japanese painting style. However, she went decades without making a single pumpkin. The funny-looking fruit eventually resurfaced in her work by the late 1970s. Now, pumpkins are a dear symbol of Yayoi Kusama’s legacy.

Yayoi Kusama and the Polka Dot

The Polka Dot Princess, otherwise known as Yayoi Kusama, spent most of her childhood in nature, during which she first experienced hallucinations.

The imaginary things that she saw became her source of inspiration. She described these hallucinations as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. She saw so many dots that they became overwhelming and it felt like they were swallowing her whole. From then on, she had a growing obsession with dots. A star was born!

“My life is a dot among thousands of other dots.” Yayoi Kusama

The polka dot became one of Kusama’s defining motifs. Through repetition, dots could cover objects, surfaces and spaces, reflecting ideas of infinity and the dissolution of the self.

Yayoi Kusama and Women in Art

Yayoi Kusama gained significant attention alongside Andy Warhol during the New York art scene of the sixties. Both artists worked in New York City, ran with a similar crowd and enjoyed significant attention.

Kusama had a long, productive career in which she experimented with the use of pattern, repetition and recurring themes of obsession. Her work can be considered a forerunner of both Pop Art and Minimalism, developing alongside artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol.

Her influence also reached beyond the traditional art world. Kusama collaborated with Lancôme, Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton, bringing her distinctive visual language into fashion and popular culture.

Through a career defined by persistence, experimentation and an instantly recognisable visual language, Kusama became one of the most influential female artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Yayoi Kusama’s Art and Legacy

Kusama’s experiences with hallucinations were closely connected to her artistic practice. Repetition became more than a visual device. It offered a way to transform deeply personal experiences into art.

Her work explored pattern, repetition, obsession and self-obliteration. Polka dots multiply. Pumpkins become symbols. Repeated forms appear to dissolve the boundaries between the individual and the surrounding world.

Kusama’s influence reaches across painting, sculpture, installation, performance and fashion. Her distinctive visual language helped challenge traditional boundaries between artwork and viewer, while making complex ideas about identity and infinity instantly recognisable.

At Moco Museum London, Kusama’s work sits within a wider dialogue between influential modern and contemporary artists. Moco Museum is an independent modern and contemporary art museum with locations in Amsterdam, Barcelona and London, presenting modern, contemporary, digital, immersive and street art through accessible and emotionally engaging experiences.

Experience Yayoi Kusama in London

Experiencing Yayoi Kusama in London offers a closer look at an artist whose pumpkins and polka dots became instantly recognisable around the world. Behind them lies a deeper exploration of obsession, identity and infinity.

Discover Kusama alongside other influential artists in the Modern Masters collection at Moco Museum London. Her work remains a powerful example of how intensely personal experiences can become a visual language understood around the world.