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TOKYO — Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who splashed her signature polka dots on paintings, sculptures and museum installations around the world, has died, her company said Thursday. She was 97.

Kusama died Aug. 14 at a hospital in Tokyo, Yayoi Kusama Studio said in a statement.

Kusama, one of Japan’s most respected contemporary artists, was widely exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Repetitive motifs in various shapes were her trademark, resembling netting, swirls or worms, but most often dots, dancing proudly on her canvases or as sparkling balls or dots of light in her installations in all their vibrant, psychedelic glory.

Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” 2013.

(EPW Studio / David Zwirner, New York)

In 2017, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the first U.S. museum survey of the Tokyo artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms at the Broad. The rooms generated “Hamilton”-scale hype.

Kusama told The Times: “I believe that people are attracted by the infinite mysterious beauty that the artwork has. I am also attracted.”

Now two of Kusama’s pieces on permanent display at the Broad draw, on any given day, a line of visitors to see the immersive art pieces for mere moments. “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” on the first floor, requires reservations to stand for one minute in a small mirrored room full of bouncing LED lights that make you feel like you’re floating in the Milky Way. “Longing for Eternity,” on the third floor, also draws lines but does not require a reservation to peek inside a chamber that gives off a purple disco dance floor vibe.

Both conjure a sense of awe, of boundless imagination. Millions have entered the “Souls” room, snapping photos and video that elicit floods of Instagram likes, since its opening in 2017.

Kusama, known for her fiery red wig, lived by choice in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital for decades. She had opened her own museum in Tokyo yet remained very private, granting limited interviews.

Kusama insisted she drew the way she saw the world — covered with spots, part of the hallucinations she said she had from childhood. She was one of the first Japanese women to go to New York to pursue her art, in 1957.

Although soft-spoken and shy in her mannerisms, she was always unabashedly bold in the assertion of her dotty vision, not only in sticking to the style for decades but also in making it accessible to the masses.

In her later years, as the times caught up with her art, she enjoyed fame. She signed on with fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton as well as other licensed products including teacups, T-shirts and key chains with her illustrations and replicas of her likeness that were used in show windows and other marketing.

In 2008, Christie’s auctioned her work for $5.8 million. In 2016, she won the most prestigious award Japan gives its artists, the Order of Culture.

Upon receiving the award, she told reporters she was more determined than ever to pursue her art, stressing that the sincerity and devotion she had demonstrated in her personal life were crucial parts of her artistic legacy.

“I feel there is little left in my life, but I am now still fighting to the death for my art,” she said. “I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead.”

Kusama was called pop, avant-garde, feminist, just to name some of the categories thrown at her, most of which Kusama brushed off as not quite representative of her art.

She was born in a middle-class family but felt misunderstood, as her parents wanted her simply to get married. They wanted to buy her kimono, not paints and brushes. She knew she had to get away. She chose America.

When she arrived in New York, the fad was “action painting,” characterized by dribbles, swooshes and smears, not dots. She suffered years of poverty and obscurity. But she kept painting dots.

She put circles of paper on people’s bodies, and once a horse, in “happening” antiwar performances in the late 1960s, which got some people arrested for obscenity but helped get media attention for her art. While in New York, she befriended artists including Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe and Joseph Cornell, who praised her innovative style.

Over the years, Kusama has made quirky but stunningly celebratory works such as “Macaroni Girl,” a female figure plastered with macaroni, which expresses the fear of food; “The Visionary Flowers,” giant sculptures of twisting tulips; and “Mirrored Corridor,” a room with mirrors that delivers an illusion of a field of phallic protrusions speckled with dots.

Kusama, who has also made films and published several novels, said she wasn’t sure where she got her ideas. She just picked up her brush and started drawing. The process was so mysterious sometimes she surprised herself, she told the Associated Press.

“I think, ‘Oh, I drew that? I was thinking that,’” she said.

She appeared happy to have her art be the focus of media attention and praise, reading one of her poems to a reporter or tackling her artworks with gusto for photos.

But she was also a charmingly disarming mix of vulnerability and defiance — at one moment declaring herself “an artistic revolutionary” and then, the next, mumbling: “I am so afraid, all the time, of everything.”

Times staff writer Deborah Vankin contributed to this report.