Yayoi Kusama turned one of artâs simplest shapes into a language understood around the world. As Japan mourns one of its most recognisable artists, her extraordinary career raises an interesting question for Africa: how far can a distinctly local creative voice travel?
You didnât need to speak Japanese to understand Yayoi Kusama.
You needed eyes. And, preferably, a fairly high tolerance for polka dots.
For more than seven decades, Kusama covered canvases, pumpkins, sculptures, rooms and occasionally people in dots. Walk into one of her famous Infinity Mirror Rooms and there could be thousands of them reflected around you. Walk into a museum shop afterwards and, chances are, the dots followed you there too.
Kusama died in Tokyo on 14 August 2026 at the age of 97. By then, the girl born in Matsumoto, Japan, had become one of the most recognisable contemporary artists in the world. Her death was announced later in August, prompting tributes across the international art world.
That alone is remarkable.
But perhaps the more interesting part of her story, particularly from an African perspective, is how she became recognisable.
She made the world learn her visual language.
A dot is never just a dot.
There is a temptation to look at Kusamaâs work and think: Well, I could have painted dots.
This is one of artâs great occupational hazards. Someone hangs a white canvas in a gallery and suddenly half the room discovers a previously unknown career in contemporary art.
But Kusamaâs dots were never simply decoration.
She spoke throughout her life about experiencing hallucinations from childhood in which patterns, flowers, nets and dots multiplied around her. Repetition eventually became central to her work, appearing in her Infinity Nets, installations, sculptures and performances. Her dots became connected to ideas of infinity and what she called âself-obliterationâ: the individual disappearing into something much larger.
What began as something deeply personal became something astonishingly universal.
A person in Tokyo could recognise it.
So could someone in Paris.
Or New York.
Or Johannesburg.
No subtitles required.
And that is where Kusama's story becomes interesting for Africa.
What would the African equivalent look like?
Africa is hardly short of visual languages.
Across the continent, pattern, colour, sculpture, textiles, beadwork, architecture, illustration and symbols have communicated identity and history for generations. Contemporary African artists are building on those traditions while creating entirely new ones.
Yet when African creativity enters the global conversation, there can still be pressure to make it easily digestible for an international audience.
Kusama's career suggests another possibility.
Perhaps the goal is not to make your work look more like everybody else's.
Perhaps the goal is to make something so unmistakably yours that everybody else eventually learns how to recognise it.
Kusama did not spend decades asking whether dots were internationally marketable.
She kept making dots.
Eventually, the dots became international.
There is something wonderfully stubborn about that.
From Matsumoto to the world
Kusama's global success did not happen overnight.
She moved to the United States in the late 1950s and became part of New York's avant-garde art scene, experimenting across painting, sculpture, installation, performance and fashion. Her career would span enormous shifts in contemporary art before later generations discovered her work through the spectacular Infinity Mirror Rooms and her instantly recognisable pumpkins.
Today, it is difficult to separate Kusama from the visual identity she created.
Yellow pumpkin?
Dots.
Mirrors?
Dots.
Entire room disappearing into infinity?
Probably Kusama.
In a world where we scroll past hundreds of images every day, being recognisable before someone has even read your name is a remarkable kind of cultural power.
And perhaps that is worth thinking about as African creative industries grow.
What is the image from Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Accra or Cape Town that someone in Tokyo might one day recognise before reading the caption?
Not because it looks Japanese.
Not because it looks European.
Because it looks unmistakably like itself.
ç””: when the picture does the talking
Our JLCSA Word of the Month is ç”” (e), meaning picture, drawing or painting.
It is an appropriately tiny word for an enormous idea.
Language helps us explain ourselves. Art sometimes gets there first.
Japan has demonstrated this extraordinarily well. Manga, anime, ukiyo-e, fashion, architecture and contemporary art have all carried pieces of Japanese culture far beyond the country's borders.
You do not necessarily need to understand every cultural reference before an image makes you curious enough to want to know more.
Africa has that same potential.
Our stories do not always need to be translated into somebody else's visual vocabulary before they can travel.
Sometimes they simply need to be drawn, painted, animated, photographed, sculpted or designed boldly enough to make the world curious.
Kusama spent a lifetime repeating one of the simplest shapes imaginable.
A circle.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Until eventually, much of the world knew exactly whose dot it was.
Perhaps that is the lesson worth keeping.
In art, as in language, you don't always have to speak like everybody else to be understood.
Sometimes you have to become so fluent in your own voice that the rest of the world starts learning it.
