Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots and mirrored rooms drew enormous crowds to galleries across the world, has died in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 97.

Kusama first came to prominence alongside the pop art movement, and became one of the rare contemporary artists to win a genuinely mass audience. Her dots spread across gallery walls, sculptures and entire buildings, while her Infinity Mirror Rooms used mirrors and light to make pattern and colour appear to recede endlessly.

She traced the imagery to hallucinations of dots and lights she experienced as a child, and drew on those visions in her work from the 1960s onwards. A major international breakthrough followed her representation of Japan at the Venice Biennale in the 1990s, and her work was later shown at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

Her audiences were often invited to take part. At the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in 2017, visitors applied more than 800,000 dot stickers to a white room and to themselves. Tate Modern followed a 2012 retrospective with an installation of the Infinity Mirror Rooms from 2021 that proved popular enough to be extended several times. More recently her figures and shapes filled Manchester’s Aviva Studios when the venue opened in 2023, and a towering sculpture of the artist appeared above a Paris flagship store the same year.

Kusama lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital for several decades, working from a studio nearby.

Reported by the BBC. Read the original coverage: In pictures: The dotty world of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.