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YAYOI KUSAMA WORLD’S MOST POPULAR ARTIST

FULL NAME: Yayoi Kusama

BORN: MARCH 22, 1929, MATSUMOTO, JAPAN

NATIONALITY: JAPANESE

Yayoi’s work is popular among all ages around the world. Here, a young girl visits the Yayoi Kusama Exposition in France’s Centre Pompidou, in 2012.

POLKA-DOT PRINCESS

The trademark of Yayoi Kusama’s art is brightly colored polka dots, but her work encompasses so much more: painting, sculpture, performance art, fashion, writing, film—the list goes on. Yayoi is recognized as one of the most important living Japanese artists, as well as one of the top living artists around the world.

Yayoi has dealt with mental health issues since childhood. Since 1977, she has chosen to live in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, Japan, across the street from which she has an artist studio. Yayoi’s work helps her process the world she sees and to share her experiences. She has won a number of international awards and has influenced artists and musicians from around the globe.

Yayoi is believed to have influenced such artistic giants as Andy Warhol (of Marilyn Monroe screen-print fame) and Claes Oldenburg (known for giant everyday objects). Her early work set the scene for significant art movements that followed, including pop art and minimalism. However, the incredibly talented Yayoi was widely forgotten between the 1970s and 2000, when she left the New York art scene and moved back to her native Japan. Fortunately, love for her art was rekindled, and she has had major exhibitions of her work in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), London’s Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her star is on the rise again, and in 2008, one of her pieces sold for an incredible $5.1 million—a record for a living female artist. Spectacularly, in 2014, at the age of 86, Yayoi was labeled the world’s most popular artist, as ranked by museum attendance. This was for the touring retrospective of her work, which attracted over two million visitors at galleries all around the globe.