What Yayoi Kusama Taught Me About Creativity

I was sad to learn that Yayoi Kusama passed away this week at 97.

Her work has fascinated me for years, but I feel especially lucky to have experienced it in two very different places recently: seeing her iconic pumpkins on Naoshima in Japan in 2025, and stepping inside one of her Infinity Rooms in Copenhagen this summer.

They were completely different experiences, but both had that unmistakable Kusama quality—the feeling that you had briefly stepped out of the everyday world and into one entirely of her making.

That may be what has always inspired me most about her.

Kusama developed a visual language that was completely her own and stayed committed to it for decades. Dots, repetition, mirrors, pumpkins, color—things that became instantly recognizable as hers. She kept creating throughout her life, eventually becoming one of the most celebrated contemporary artists in the world.

Her life—and her idea of home—were just as unconventional.

For decades, Kusama chose to live in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo while continuing to create at her nearby studio. I’ve always found that fascinating. Here was an artist who created fantastical, immersive environments for millions of people around the world, while choosing a very different kind of environment for herself to live and work.

As someone who thinks about homes for a living, that resonates with me. There is no single definition of what home needs to look like—or of the environment each of us needs in order to feel comfortable, thrive and create.

Kusama seemed to understand both herself and the world she wanted to create with extraordinary clarity.

I brought home one of her pumpkins from Japan, and as I type this, it’s sitting on my desk beside me. I look at it a little differently now.

It’s a small reminder of an artist who spent a lifetime creating an entire world that was unmistakably her own.

What an extraordinary thing to leave behind.

— Matt
MODERNAE