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Polka dots, pumpkins, and panorama define Yayoi Kusama’s artistic practice, but in the auction market, these motifs also shape how value is unevenly distributed across her oeuvre. While prints and editions continue to sustain transaction volume, the majority of market value is concentrated in a relatively small number of trophy works and iconic series. In 2025, prints and editions accounted for more than half of all lots sold yet generated only 11% of total auction revenue, while the five highest-priced works accounted for 31% of annual market value.

This pattern reflects a structural shift within Kusama’s market. During the speculative expansion of 2020–2022, demand intensified across price tiers and aggressive bidding drove rapid price growth. Today, the market remains active, but value creation has become increasingly selective. Paintings tied to key series and historically significant works continue to anchor market value, while the expanding edition segment supports transaction volume but demonstrates greater sensitivity to supply conditions.

In other words, Kusama’s market still trades, but value is increasingly less evenly distributed across the market. Liquidity remains the backdrop, sustained by the circulation of prints and editions, yet the broad-based momentum that characterised the pandemic-era expansion has faded. Instead, value creation has become concentrated in trophy works, iconic series, and a limited number of high-quality paintings produced earlier in Kusama’s career.

Understanding this divergence is essential for evaluating Kusama’s market today. While the artist remains one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary art, the structure of her market has evolved, reflecting shifts in supply dynamics, bidding behaviour, and collector behaviour.

Dataset and market scope

This report analyses publicly available auction data for works by Yayoi Kusama sold between 2018 and 2025 across major international auction houses. The dataset includes 2,523 auction results across auction results globally, across all mediums, including paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and prints and editions.

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Several structural indicators were examined to evaluate the evolution of Kusama’s market, including sell-through rates, revenue trends, price levels, estimate accuracy, repeat-sale performance, and geographic distribution of sales. While private transactions play a meaningful role in Kusama’s broader market, auction results remain the most transparent indicator of pricing behaviour and market liquidity.

Macro context

Kusama’s market has evolved alongside broader structural changes within the contemporary art market. Over the past decade, contemporary art has expanded dramatically as the dominant segment of the auction market, with auction houses increasingly prioritising post-war and contemporary sales cycles as their primary engines of revenue growth. Further, the pandemic-era boom between 2020 and 2022 was characterised by abundant liquidity across financial markets and a wave of new collector participation. Rising discretionary wealth and the digitisation of auctions expanded access to the market for younger and geographically diverse collectors.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Within this environment, demand gravitated toward artists with strong global recognition and highly identifiable visual languages. Kusama’s work, with its instantly recognisable motifs and broad institutional validation, proved particularly well positioned to benefit from this surge in attention. Auction houses responded by expanding supply, especially in prints and editions, while competitive bidding frequently pushed hammer prices well above estimates. Editions soon became a reliable source of liquidity for auctions and were frequently placed in New York, Hong Kong, and London sales. The accessibility of her imagery, combined with a wide range of price points across mediums, allowed her market to attract both established collectors and newer entrants to the contemporary art market. As a result, in 2023, Kusama was the top selling artist globally, beating out David Hockney.

More recently, however, the contemporary market has shown signs of normalisation following the rapid expansion of the pandemic-era years. Auction house estimates have become more conservative, and bidding competition has moderated across several segments of the market, evidenced by increasingly fewer lots exceeding their high estimate. Within this environment, Kusama’s market has begun to exhibit clearer segmentation between high-value paintings and the broader edition market.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

These patterns reflect a broader market dynamic in which value creation concentrates in a limited number of high-quality works while transaction activity expands across a wider set of objects. This structure is characteristic of supply-driven market growth, where increasing availability sustains liquidity but does not necessarily translate into sustained price expansion.

Market structure and liquidity 

Liquidity conditions

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Although Kusama’s auction market remains consistently active, her market liquidity, defined as the sell-through rate, has moderated since the speculative peak. Between 2018 and 2025, the average sell-through rate was 86.9%, indicating stable buyer participation across the period. During the peak years of 2020 and 2021, this figure approached 97–98%, reflecting exceptionally strong demand conditions. By 2025, the sell-through rate had declined to 80.7%, suggesting a more balanced environment in which buyers exercise greater selectivity. This moderation is particularly visible among higher-value mediums. Painting sell-through declined from near-perfect levels during the boom to 79.1% in 2025, while sculpture fell further to 74.0%. By contrast, prints and editions remained comparatively resilient at 82.3%, continuing to provide a consistent source of liquidity despite representing the largest share of auction supply.

Volume and supply expansion

This moderation in liquidity coincides with a steady expansion in auction supply. Lot counts increased across the period, outpacing revenue growth in most years. This growth is driven largely by the growing circulation of prints and editions, which now represent the majority of Kusama’s auction lots, supply driven growth. The relationship between supply and revenue remains strong, with a correlation of approximately 0.915 between annual lot counts and total market turnover.

However, this expansion has been driven primarily by rising transaction volume rather than sustained price growth. As more works enter the market, average lot values have remained stable or declined, indicating that increased supply has not translated into higher pricing across the market.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Revenue trends 

This dynamic becomes particularly visible in overall revenue trends. Auction turnover reached a peak of approximately $176.9mm in 2023 before declining to $46.8mm in 2025, even as transaction volume remained relatively stable.

This volatility reflects the market’s sensitivity to the availability of a relatively small number of high-value works. Because large-scale paintings appear infrequently but generate a disproportionate share of total market value, annual revenue can fluctuate significantly depending on whether these works enter the auction market. Years in which more major paintings appear tend to produce sharp increases in turnover, while periods dominated by smaller works and editions generate substantially lower revenue despite continued trading activity. Because the growth is supply driven, pricing power shifts to buyers. 

Auction behaviour 

Estimate discipline 

A reversion in auction estimates reinforces the shift toward a more selective market environment. During the speculative peak in 2021, the median hammer price reached approximately 1.95 times the mid-estimate, reflecting aggressive bidding and widespread price escalation.

In subsequent years, this ratio declined sharply, falling to 1.20 in 2022 before stabilising closer to estimate levels in 2023 and 2024. By 2025, the median hammer-to-mid-estimate ratio had declined further to 0.91, indicating that works were increasingly selling at or below their expected price levels. Similarly, the proportion of lots selling above their high estimate fell from 82.1% in 2021 to just 19.1% in 2025.

Together, these indicators suggest that auction houses and collectors have moved away from the aggressive price discovery that characterised the pandemic boom toward a more disciplined pricing environment.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Price structure 

Median price compression 

Median prices declined from approximately $160.8k at the peak of the pandemic-era expansion to $24.5k in 2025. This contraction reflects both the normalisation of demand following the speculative conditions of 2020–2022 and a shift in the composition of works entering the market. As bidding intensity has moderated and a larger share of lower-value works, particularly prints and editions, has appeared at auction, aggregate price indicators have moved downward.

However, median price trends vary significantly across mediums. Paintings continue to occupy a structurally higher pricing tier, with median prices rising from approximately $397.8k in 2018 to a peak of $595.0k in 2022 before moderating to $360.3k in 2025. Even after this normalisation, paintings maintain substantially higher median values than other categories.

By contrast, prints and editions operate within a far lower price band, typically ranging between approximately $17k and $43k across the period. Works on paper occupy an intermediate tier, with median prices reaching $170k during the market peak in 2021 before stabilising closer to $50k–$65k in subsequent years. Sculpture and mixed-media works display greater volatility and significantly lower median pricing, reflecting both smaller transaction volumes and less consistent collector demand.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Price per square meter 

A similar pattern appears in size-adjusted pricing. Median price density declined from $63.6/cm² at the height of the market to roughly $17.0/cm² in 2025. However, price density varies substantially across mediums. Paintings consistently occupy the highest pricing tier, with median price density rising from approximately $73/cm² in 2018 to a peak of roughly $193/cm² in 2022 before moderating to around $148/cm² in 2025. Works on paper occupy an intermediate tier, while prints and editions operate within a structurally lower band, typically ranging between approximately $9/cm² and $36/cm².

Price density also varies across Kusama’s most recognisable motifs. Works from the Pumpkin series exhibit significantly higher price density, with a median of $70.17/cm², compared with the Flowers series, which has a median price density of approximately $11.98/cm². The Hats series has the highest disparity between median and mean size-adjusted price, indicating there are significant outliers in that series. 

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Similarly, when price density is examined by artwork size, large works (greater than 10,000 cm²) achieve a median price density of approximately $61.20/cm², while medium-sized works (2,500–10,000 cm²) exhibit substantially lower density at roughly $10.72/cm². Smaller works display greater dispersion, reflecting the presence of high-value objects within relatively small formats, though their median price density remains below that of large-scale works.

These patterns demonstrate that pricing within Kusama’s market is structured by medium, motif, and scale. While aggregate price indicators have declined since the pandemic peak, paintings and iconic series continue to sustain significantly higher price density than other segments of the market.

Market segmentation

Paintings vs editions 

One of the defining structural features of Kusama’s market is the divergence between paintings and editions. While editions account for the majority of transactions, paintings generate the majority of economic value.

In 2025, prints and editions represented 194 of the 373 lots sold, more than half of total auction activity, yet these works generated only 11.1% of annual auction revenue. Paintings, by contrast, appear far less frequently but consistently produce the largest share of market value, accounting for between 56% and 70% of revenue between 2022 and 2025.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

This imbalance reflects both supply dynamics and collector behaviour. Editions circulate frequently and provide accessible entry points for collectors, sustaining transaction liquidity. Paintings, however, are significantly scarcer and often associated with historically significant series within Kusama’s practice.

As a result, Kusama’s market has become increasingly bifurcated: a high-volume edition market supports liquidity, while a smaller number of paintings anchor value creation.

Value concentration 

Top 10% share and Gini coefficient 

Market value within Kusama’s auction market has become increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of high-value works. In 2018, the top 10% of lots accounted for 51% of total auction revenue. By 2023, this share had risen to 80.1%, before moderating slightly to 74.3% in 2025. A similar pattern is reflected in the Gini coefficient, which increased from 0.64 to 0.86 over the same period, indicating a highly unequal distribution of market value.

While the Gini coefficient measures the degree of inequality within the market, it does not indicate where that concentration occurs. However, in Kusama’s case, value concentration is visible at the very top, as demonstrated by the top 1% of works regularly accounting for between 12% and 28% of annual revenue, indicating the outsized influence of trophy-level works. These works are typically large-scale paintings associated with Kusama’s most recognisable motifs.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Iconic series 

Within Kusama’s market, value concentration is closely tied to a limited number of visually recognisable series. Works associated with the Pumpkin and Infinity Net series occupy a particularly dominant position, consistently attracting the strongest bidding competition.

Outlier analysis highlights the degree of this concentration: the Pumpkin series alone accounts for approximately 42.6% of outlier revenue, while the five most commercially significant series collectively generate 78.2% of outlier results.

Market geography and seasonality 

Geography 

Kusama’s auction market is geographically diversified but strongly influenced by Asian demand. Since 2018, auction revenue has been concentrated across three primary market centres: Hong Kong ($302.5mm), New York ($126.2mm), and London ($75.0mm).

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Hong Kong accounts for the largest share of auction revenue, reflecting Kusama’s strong cultural resonance within the Japanese and broader Asian art market as well as the continued growth of collector participation across the region.

However, bidding dynamics vary across regions. Asian auctions frequently sustain transaction volume and liquidity, particularly for prints and editons and mid-tier paintings. By contrast, Western sales in New York and London often exhibit stronger hammer-to-estimate ratios, suggesting more competitive bidding conditions for higher-value works.

This geographic differentiation effectively creates a division of market roles. Asian auctions sustain market liquidity and turnover, while Western auction houses often serve as the primary venues for price competition among top-tier works.

Seasonality 

Kusama’s auction market is closely tied to the global contemporary sales calendar, with the majority of high-value transactions occurring during the spring and autumn auction cycles. These periods correspond to the flagship contemporary sales in New York and Hong Kong, which function as the primary venues for price discovery within the market.

Revenue is heavily concentrated within these months. May auctions account for approximately 25% of annual revenue, while November sales contribute nearly 17%, meaning that more than 40% of yearly market value is generated during these two sales periods.

Works appearing within these cycles benefit from stronger collector attention, deeper bidder pools, and greater competitive bidding relative to off-cycle sales.

Source: Artscapy | Visualisation: Darden Gildea

Repeat sale performance

Repeat-sale performance reinforces the divergence between mediums within Kusama’s market. Overall repeat-sale returns appear uneven and heavily influenced by outliers, with a median gross return of –10% and a median compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of –11.6%. These aggregate figures mask significant variation across different segments of the market.

When analysed by medium, paintings demonstrate materially stronger resale performance. For holding periods longer than one year, paintings exhibit a median CAGR of approximately +14.2%, indicating more consistent long-term value appreciation. Sculpture, by contrast, shows weaker results, with a median CAGR of –17%, reflecting more volatile pricing and less consistent collector demand.

Profitability is concentrated in painting, while many other segments show weaker returns over the period, not accounting for the holding period. 

Taken together, these results reinforce the broader segmentation within Kusama’s market, where paintings function as the primary drivers of long-term value while editions and secondary mediums primarily support transaction liquidity.

Capital mapping of the oeuvre

Within Kusama’s market, collector demand is not distributed evenly across the artist’s production but instead clusters around a relatively small number of recognisable series. While a wide range of works appears at auction, capital consistently gravitates toward compositions associated with Kusama’s most iconic motifs.

Outlier analysis highlights the degree of this concentration. The Pumpkin series alone accounts for 42.6% of outlier revenue, while the five most commercially significant series collectively generate 78.2% of outlier results. These figures indicate that the economic structure of Kusama’s market is closely tied to a limited group of visually distinctive works that have become synonymous with the artist’s practice.

Iconography plays an important role in shaping this pattern. Motifs such as pumpkins and Infinity Net patterns function as immediately recognisable visual identifiers within Kusama’s oeuvre. Works associated with these series benefit from stronger collector familiarity and clearer historical positioning within the artist’s career. Institutional validation further reinforces this hierarchy, establishing more consistent pricing benchmarks and supporting stronger demand in the secondary market.

As a result, capital within Kusama’s market tends to concentrate around works that combine recognisable imagery with established art historical significance. While other works continue to trade regularly and support transaction liquidity, the highest levels of market value remain closely associated with Kusama’s most iconic series. In effect, Kusama’s market operates through a form of iconographic capital, in which a limited number of motifs function as anchor points for collector demand and price formation.

Case study

The divergence between Kusama’s edition market and her painting market is particularly visible in repeat-sale performance. While prints and editions continue to trade frequently and provide liquidity within the market, their pricing has become increasingly sensitive to supply conditions and short-term fluctuations in demand.

A recent repeat-sale example illustrates this dynamic. A print from the Pumpkin (BY) series sold for $35,945 in December 2024 before returning to auction just three months later, where it achieved $24,415, representing a decline of more than 30%. Such movements are not uncommon within the edition segment, where the relatively high availability of comparable works can make prices more responsive to shifts in supply and bidding intensity.

By contrast, mid-tier paintings, particularly works from the Infinity Net series, have generally demonstrated stronger pricing stability. These works occupy a structurally different position within Kusama’s market. Paintings appear far less frequently at auction and are more closely tied to key moments in the artist’s artistic development, which increases their desirability among collectors and institutions. As a result, they function as the primary drivers of market value rather than as high-turnover liquidity assets.

This divergence illustrates the broader economic structure of Kusama’s market. Prints and editions sustain transaction volume and provide entry points for collectors, while paintings, especially those associated with historically significant series, anchor long-term value and play a disproportionate role in shaping overall market performance.

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Strategic pathways 

When selling may be advantageous

Selling a mid-tier Kusama work can still be effective under certain circumstances. The best candidates for sale in the current markets are works of any medium that fall within a highly recognisable series, specifically Pumpkins or Infinity Nets. Secondly, works from earlier decades carry a higher demand, given Kusama’s age. Lastly, works in which the seller’s expectation is aligned with current pricing levels.

Given Kusama’s sales exhibit seasonality, in both volume and value, the best timing for her sales are May and November, corresponding with the contemporary sale cycles in New York and Hong Kong. Day sales and smaller auction sales surrounding these Marquee evening sales because evening auctions often benefit from higher bidder participation. That being said, selling during these periods might be less advantageous when there are multiple prints appearing in the same sale.