Step into one of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, and you’ll see different views of yourself everywhere you turn. Face one way in these spaces full of reflective surfaces and colored shapes, and you might spot a giant bold blue circle jutting from your head. Pivot, and you’ll see your endlessly repeating reflection, as if you’ve suddenly morphed into a human version of a paper-doll chain. The possibilities for self-reflection are, well, infinite.
“Forget yourself,” the celebrated Japanese contemporary artist encourages visitors to her famous spaces. “Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.”
It’s impossible not to become part of Kusama’s fully immersive and highly sensory Infinity Mirror Rooms, two of which will be on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through September 7, 2024 starting on October 14. The exhibit, titled Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love, marks the first time Kusama’s rooms have appeared in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The 94-year-old Kusama, whose work encompasses paintings, sculptures, films and fashion, created her first mirrored environment in 1965, and her first darkened Infinity Mirror Room in 2000. She has since constructed more than 20 such installations from materials including mirrored glass, wood, aluminum, vinyl, rubber, plastic, acrylic balls and massive blankets of LED lights that evoke vast expanses of stars. Installing Kusama’s rooms involves a crew of skilled technicians and art handlers, and can take up to two weeks.
“Kusama’s participatory artworks not only inspire wonder and delight, but for many visitors, more poignantly resonate with larger ideas of our relationship to the environment and to one another,” Tanya Zimbardo, SFMOMA’s assistant curator of media arts, said in an email interview.
The two rooms coming to SFMOMA include 2023’s “Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love,” which contains a 13-foot white cube visitors enter by crouching through a door shaped like a quarter circle. Inside, flickering ambient light filters through transparent colored windows to form a pattern of kaleidoscopic overlapping circles.
“This is fabulously trippy,” one Instagram user said of the new room when it debuted to much fanfare earlier this year at New York’s David Zwirner gallery. (Instagram users have tagged more than 1.2 million posts and reels with Kusama’s name.)
The other room opening in Northern California, “Love Is Calling,” premiered in Japan in 2013 and is one of Kusama’s largest, most immersive works. The room measures about 28 feet by 20 feet by 15 feet and invites visitors into a dark mirrored space illuminated by 12 tentacle-like inflatable sculptures that rise from the floor and descend from the ceiling. The signature dots that earned the artist the nickname “princess of polka dots” festoon the strange structures, which change colors and stay pumped up with the help of motorized internal blowers.
As viewers make their way through “Love Is Calling,” Kusama recites a love poem she wrote that plays continuously in Japanese.
The poem, titled “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears,” muses on life, death and Kusama’s desire to spread messages of love through her art. The English translation that greets visitors after they exit the room provides the perfect coda to the dreamlike experience. “Hoping to leave beautiful footprints at the end of my life, I spend each day wishing that my wish will be fulfilled,” the poem reads. “This is my message of love to you.”
The Infinity Mirror Rooms have traveled from Los Angeles to London, Hong Kong to Houston to Tel Aviv, and often draw long lines of spectators willing to wait hours for a quick peek inside. At SFMOMA, which anticipates big crowds for the Kusama exhibit, groups of six at a time wander through each room for just two minutes each. That’s less time than it takes to get your ticket scanned and ride the elevator up to the museum’s sixth floor to enter the rooms. But it’s enough to feel like you’ve been dropped into a psychedelic dreamscape.
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