Yayoi Kusama: Infinity rooms
Reuben Keehan, curator of QAGOMA’s 2017–18 Yayoi Kusama focused survey in Brisbane, provides a brief history of Kusama’s infinity rooms, including the National Gallery’s 2018 acquisition ‘THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS’.
Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms have become synonymous with her current extraordinary popularity. Reports of her recent exhibitions inevitably feature descriptions of crowds queuing for hours to catch the smallest glimpse of these beguiling creations, even though viewing times are restricted—often to less than a minute—to accommodate the unprecedented demand for Kusama’s artistic vision. Kusama’s mirror works are indeed fascinating, but while they are central to her current public renown, they, like the rest of her practice, have an extensive history.
Kusama’s original mirror works were created during the intensely inventive decade that followed her arrival in New York as a 29-year-old artist in 1958. It was there that the small surrealist-inflected watercolours produced in the early part of her career in Japan grew into immense abstract canvases. Executed in oils with an extremely restricted palette, these paintings consisted of tiny loops that accumulated into ‘nets’ that covered the canvas from edge to edge. These works grew in scale, at one point covering a wall ten metres long, signalling that the surface of the canvas was no longer enough for Kusama’s artistic ambition. She then moved to sculpture, fixing sewn and stuffed protuberances she referred to as ‘phalli’ to all manner of everyday objects, as if the loops had assumed three-dimensional form and covered every imaginable surface.
First presented in November 1965, Infinity Mirror Room Phalli’s Field utilised mirrors to dramatically expand the space that the phalli could potentially occupy. By constructing a small room with four mirrored walls, she created the illusion of endless space, with the objects inside appearing to multiply into infinity. Encompassing, disorienting and seducing its audiences, the work was a milestone for the artist. Not only was its perceptual effect profound, but it realised Kusama’s desire to visualise infinity, while powerfully amplifying her core concepts of repetition and accumulation.
Four months later, she experimented with an alternative use of the mirrors with Peep Show (or Endless Love Show). This work employed hexagonally opposed mirrors in a structure that viewers could peer into, rather than entering directly. Concentric rings of multi‑coloured lights and loud rock music created a mind-bending atmosphere in keeping with the psychedelic experiments to which Kusama was increasingly drawn.
From the late 1960s, her involvement with participatory events and political protest led her to work increasingly in public space, while her hospitalisation in Japan in the late 1970s severely curtailed her ability to make large-scale sculpture and installation. She preoccupied herself with writing, winning literary acclaim for her novels and poetry. Nevertheless, her sketches and collages from this period demonstrate a yearning for a more expanded field, their depictions of space bearing a striking resemblance to the visual universes of her mirror rooms.
“I hope that the power of art can make the world more peaceful.“ — Yayoi Kusama
By the late 1980s, Kusama experienced a mid-career reappraisal, and an invitation to show in a Tokyo museum in 1991 enabled the creation of her first mirror work in twenty-five years, Mirror Room (Pumpkin). The work positioned a reflective cube in the centre of a room painted yellow with black polka dots. A peephole in the side of the cube introduced viewers to a crop of handmade pumpkins (a motif that had emerged in her work of the 1980s), themselves reflected into infinity by a set of internal mirrors. Mirror Room (Pumpkin) travelled to the Venice Biennale of 1993, where it introduced a new generation of international audiences to Kusama’s audacious work.
The opportunity led to invitations to exhibit worldwide and, with them, the chance to work in ambitious ways. In 1996, she created Repetitive Vision for a contemporary art space in Pittsburgh, featuring a cluster of shop mannequins covered in red polka dots. In 1998 and 1999, a survey of her New York period, Love Forever 1958–1968, toured North American museums with a full-scale re-creation of her 1965 Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field, which also appeared in the 2000 Biennale of Sydney. Also in 2000, she suspended one hundred and fifty tiny lightbulbs over water for the mirror room Fireflies on the Water at the Le Consortium in Dijon, France, and created the companion piece Soul Under the Moon, using fluorescent ping-pong balls under black light, for the then upcoming 2002 Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.
As Kusama’s popular and critical renown has grown, her mirror rooms have evolved in new and exciting ways. But as an artist she also works cyclically, regularly revisiting earlier forms and motifs. THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS 2017, recreates her groundbreaking Mirror Room (Pumpkin) just as her work piques the curiosity of another generation. Here, the rough-hewn, handmade pumpkins of the original are replaced with an elegantly curved batch, their self-illumination adding a new element of wonder. As an artist, Kusama works with an intense focus, often to the exclusion of all else. Her mirror rooms open her practice up to the world, just as they draw the world into her art.
Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. First published in Artonview, no 97, autumn 2019.
Yayoi Kusama’s THE SPIRITS OF THE PUMPKINS DESCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS 2017 was purchased for the National Gallery of Australia in 2018 with the assistance of Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett.
