Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room at the NMACC: An escape into the unknown

Yayoi Kusama’s life story is as enigmatic as her art. Born in 1929, Kusama had a troubled childhood. The oft-repeated story is of how her mother would make her spy on her father, who was an incurable womanizer. She was also the subject of her mother’s rage. Art was Kusama’s escape from a young age: Sitting outdoors, she’d have hallucinations where fields of flowers would transform into polka dots. Kusama has said she was mentally ill even then, suffering from “depersonalization”, and later developing OCD. Both are reflected in her paintings, which Kusama has, over time, come to articulate as therapy.

From canvas in her Infinity Net paintings to a real-world iteration in Infinity Mirror Rooms, the dot motif in particular proliferates. Kusama has said that she “painted them in quantity; in doing so I try to escape.” The thing to know about Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms is that they always—unfailingly—elicit a visceral reaction.

Standing in the middle of this room, you might feel both mobile and at a standstill in a vast, endless space. You might spot yourself, reflected in this mirrored fantasia, and feel magnanimous and insignificant at once. You might find answers to your greatest, most existential questions—or realize that the question is in fact the delicate answer. As all great artists, Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms are open to interpretation.

‘Infinity Mirror Room—The Eternally Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth, 2020’ is one of over 20 such rooms, created by Kusama, scattered all over the planet. The first, created in 1965, was called ‘Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (Floor Show)’, was exhibited at the Castellane Gallery in New York, towards the end of Kusama’s American sojourn which began in 1957. Phalli’s Field was a space whose floors were lined with mirrors, upon which stood a large number of polka-dot emblazoned, phallic-shaped, stuffed toy-like objects.

In a cruel twist of fate, in 1966, another better-known gallery in New York opened a new show by the American artist Lucas Samaras, titled “Room No 2.” It was eerily similar, also featuring a mirrored interior; and Samaras came to be known as the originator of this form of art. Kusama was devastated—this incident was one of the reasons for a thwarted suicide attempt; followed by her return to Japan and slipping into depression during the 1970s, having not found the community she yearned for at home or in the world.

Over time, credit was given where it was due and Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms grew in ambition and scope, increasingly drawing from technology and light. Their scale and the visual nature of the experience has made these rooms especially popular in the age of Instagram, especially since they automatically put the viewer at the centre of the artwork. Within the art world, Kusama has been called “prophetic” for anticipating this moment of immersive art and the notion of the magnified spectacle—be it at galleries like Atelier des Lumieres in Paris, the many travelling Van Gogh 360 exhibits, or teamLab Japan’s Borderless installations.

But Kusama’s rooms are more than just “awesome”; they are deeper meditations or explorations of human connection or disengagement. With titles as poetic as ‘My Heart Is Dancing Into the Universe’, ‘The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away’, ‘Longing for Eternity’, there is bound to be a certain whimsy attached to them. When you do manage to book a slot for ‘Infinity Mirror Room—The Eternally Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth, 2020’ at the NMACC—among the largest of its kind—you’ll have roughly 15 minutes to unearth it.