Standing Before My Own Reflection: Remembering Yayoi Kusama
- Erik Sadao
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
Some artists you admire from a distance. Yayoi Kusama is one of the few whose work has physically stopped me in place, in more than one country, and I've spent the last few days training our guides here in Amsterdam on her life ahead of the retrospective at the Stedelijk, running from 11 September 2026 to 17 January 2027.
What was supposed to be a straightforward briefing turned into something closer to a eulogy. Kusama died this August, at 97, just weeks before our modern art museum was set to unveil seven decades of her work, and the show became a tribute overnight. We're still guiding clients through it, but our guides now open differently than we planned a month ago, and getting that tone right, respectful, not mournful, has taken more care than I expected.
The first time I understood why she mattered, though, had nothing to do with Amsterdam. It happened years earlier at the Brazilian Inhotim, one of the world's largest open air museum, in front of a lawn scattered with hundreds of mirrored steel balls.
A garden that keeps looking back
I walked into Narcissus Garden expecting to stay two minutes. I stayed almost an hour, watching my face and the people around me fracture across the curved spheres, stretched, swallowed by sky and treetops. I wasn't looking at the art, I was being looked at by it, the same idea behind a story I'd rehearsed until it lived in my body: a young Japanese woman who, in 1966, wasn't invited to the Venice Biennale, and went anyway.
Kusama arrived with 1,500 mirrored spheres and, with Lucio Fontana's help, laid them on the grass outside the Italian pavilion, uninvited. In a gold kimono, she sold the balls for two dollars each, playing gallery, critic, and merchant at once, until organizers shut her down for peddling art "like hot dogs or ice cream cones." By then the point had landed: every visitor who bent over a sphere saw not the artist, not the work, but themselves, warped and repeated to infinity.
I keep thinking how precisely that predicts an idea Byung Chul Han would only name decades later: in "Saving Beauty," he argues contemporary art has gone smooth, glatt, round, a mirror for admiring our own reflection. His prime example is Jeff Koons, those polished steel sculptures that ask nothing but to notice yourself in them.
Kusama got there thirty years earlier, with none of the polish: cheap mirrored balls sold on a lawn like carnival trinkets, a street performance about vanity and the commercialization of art itself. It's a sharper critique of what Han calls the achievement society than anything in a philosophy department, and no wonder the work looks built for Instagram. It was built for exactly that impulse.
A career I kept running into
I don't think there's a museum I've walked through, anywhere, without running into a Kusama: a pumpkin, a net painting, an infinity room with a queue out the door. I've seen more than one full retrospective, years apart, and each time there was too much to take in on a single pass. Her output stayed staggering into her nineties.
Some of that persistence only makes sense once you know the rest. Kusama grew up in Matsumoto, in a family that ran a plant nursery, and had vivid hallucinations as a child, flowers that spoke to her, patterns dissolving the room around her. She drew what she saw to survive it, against her mother's wishes.
A secondhand book of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings gave her a way out. She wrote to O'Keeffe directly, and moved to New York in the late 1950s with almost nothing, sewing money into her clothes to get through customs.
New York made her, and nearly broke her. She painted obsessive net canvases, staged anti-war "happenings" covering protesters in polka dots, and built her first Infinity Mirror Room. She was also, by every account, difficult to be around: fiercely protective of her ideas, and quick to accuse.
With good reason. Her 1963 boat installation, a rowboat covered in soft phallic protrusions and repeated across the walls and ceiling, predates Andy Warhol's Cow Wallpaper by three years. Warhol saw the show and never credited her. She spent years insisting that Warhol's Factory, and Roy Lichtenstein, had borrowed more than they admitted, dots she'd been painting since childhood. Being right, and sidelined anyway as a Japanese woman outside the boys' club, is its own quiet tragedy.
By the early 1970s, broke and unwell, she went back to Japan. In 1977 she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and never really left, walking each morning to a studio nearby to paint.
A few years ago in Japan, I asked my local operator, half joking, to drive past it. He looked at me like I'd asked to visit a stranger's house, which, fair enough, I had. We went anyway. I stood outside an ordinary building in Shinjuku and thought about how the whole spectacle of Venice, the gold kimono, the theatrical selling of her own reflection, had been staged by someone who'd go on to spend the rest of her life inside four walls she rarely left.
From cult figure to household name
I have a personal stake in this that has nothing to do with philosophy. Years ago, as a director at Teresa Perez, I prepared a guided talk on Kusama's life for Brazilian travel advisors, ahead of her first major exhibition in Brazil. I rehearsed her biography until the sequence, hallucinations, New York, Warhol, the hospital in Tokyo, felt like my own. We presented an award on stage that night, and I remember thinking most of the crowd had no idea who this woman was yet. That wouldn't last long.
It was Louis Vuitton, first with Marc Jacobs in 2012 and again with Nicolas Ghesquière in 2023, that turned Kusama from an art world legend into a household name, her dots landing on handbags and shop windows just as the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Whitney staged her biggest retrospectives.
I flew to London for the Tate show that same year, and it was the first time I saw art pull travelers across borders in real numbers, queues wrapping the building, a travel economy built around one exhibition. The woman once shut down for selling mirrored balls on a Venice lawn for two dollars each had become, half a century later, the face of a luxury campaign, and the reason people were flying in to stand in that line. I don't think that irony was lost on her. Very little seemed to be.
Which brings me back to Amsterdam. Next week, our guides will stand in front of clients at the Stedelijk and open with a version of the story I've just told: the girl from Matsumoto, the hallucinations, Venice, the hospital, Vuitton, all of it compressed into the minutes we spent having a coffee before walking into the rooms.
I keep coming back, in my head, to that lawn at Inhotim, to my own face breaking apart across a hundred small mirrors, and to the strange fact that Kusama staged that exact confrontation, ours, with our own reflection, before almost anyone thought to call it art. I stood there for hours because I couldn't stop looking at myself.
That was never a flaw in the work. It was the whole point, and she knew it long before the rest of us caught up. I hope the people walking through the Stedelijk next week feel even a fraction of that.
Sapiens Travel - DMC advocates for cultural sustainability and builds artsy guides out of the box, guides that connect the dots and actually engage with our clients. Cool and fun matter to us more than covering every fact, and that's exactly the spirit we're bringing to the Stedelijk's exhibition.
