‘I fight pain and fear with art’: how Yayoi Kusama blazed a trail for neurodivergent artists

The pioneering Japanese artist talked openly about how her mental health and neurodivergence informed her creativity, paving the way for the likes of Turner prize winner Nnena Kalu

Y ayoi Kusama – who has died at the age of 97 – was 10 when she first started experiencing vivid hallucinations consisting of visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, of a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots; they would become Kusama’s artistic obsession. She hallucinated flowers, too. “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, when asked about that recurring motif. “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.”

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 and admired 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 (it ended up running until 2024).

Kusama leaves a planet that is far more enlightened about mental illness and neurodivergence than that which she entered. Different ways of seeing are increasingly embraced by the art world, which is beginning to understand how the brilliant, beautiful diversity of the human brain can feed into groundbreaking artistic practice. Neurodivergent, disabled and autistic artists are nominated for major prizes, and last year Nnena Kalu, who is autistic and has a learning disability, won the Turner prize . Furthermore, 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 who support and facilitate work by 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.”

Despite the historically unfair stigma of mental illness, Kusama was always vocal about her struggles and how they fed into her work, in the 1970s voluntarily checking herself into a mental-health facility in Tokyo and working in a studio nearby.