Yayoi Kusama, the pioneering Japanese artist who died at the age of 97, was 10 when she first experienced vivid hallucinations involving visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, depicting a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots—a motif that became Kusama’s artistic obsession. She also hallucinated flowers. “I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe”, she once said. “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.”
Art as survival and global acclaim
For Kusama, art making was a means of survival. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live”, she said in a 2012 interview. In so doing, she became one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists, staging happenings and influencing the pop art movement as a pioneering figure in the New York avant garde. Her exhibitions and major retrospectives draw huge crowds. In 2022, due to enormous public demand, Tate Modern in London extended her Infinity Mirror Rooms show for a whole extra year, with the exhibition eventually running until 2024.
Shifting perceptions of neurodivergence in art
Kusama leaves a planet far more enlightened about mental illness and neurodivergence than the one she entered. Different ways of seeing are increasingly embraced by the art world, which is beginning to understand how the diversity of the human brain can feed into groundbreaking artistic practice. Neurodivergent, disabled and autistic artists are now nominated for major prizes, and last year Nnena Kalu, who is autistic and has a learning disability, won the Turner prize. Artists such as Louis Wain, who was schizophrenic, and Andy Warhol, who had traits consistent with autism, are increasingly viewed through the lens of neurodiversity.
“Artists like Kusama, much like our own Nnena Kalu, have shown that great art does not come from a single source or follow a traditional route,” said a spokesman for ActionSpace, a London organisation supporting learning disabled artists. “The art world is richer for it, and their work continues to challenge us to recognise and celebrate the many voices that shape it.”
Kusama’s legacy and influence on neurodivergent artists
Despite the historical stigma of mental illness, Kusama was always vocal about her struggles and how they fed into her work. In the 1970s, she voluntarily checked herself into a mental-health facility in Tokyo and worked in a studio nearby. Processing the “obliteration” she experienced involved repetitive ways of working—those signature dots and flowers covering everything, including her own clothing—while her extraordinary infinity rooms, installations of mirrors and lights, took the concept of sensory overload and turned it into something magical and all-encompassing. In this way, we were granted a powerful glimpse through Kusama’s eyes.
“Kusama’s practice seemed to channel the intrinsic auditory, repetitive and hallucinatory compulsions that she experienced,” says Kate Adams, director and co-founder of Project Art Works, a collective of artists with complex needs, who were nominated for the Turner prize in 2021. “Rather than create an escape from these, her installations shaped and described for others a sometimes beautiful, sometimes overwhelming world of intensity, pattern and form.”
Adams points out that mental illnesses such as OCD are not necessarily the same as neurodivergence, and we should be wary of grouping them all together. There can be parallels, in Adams’ words, “when anxiety overwhelms wellbeing”, and often diagnoses can overlap.
Kusama often referenced how art had saved her, saying: “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.” Although disabled and neurodivergent artists still face major barriers, Kusama’s work and enduring influence stand as a lasting tribute to the complex magnificence of human perception and experience.
