A new “infinity mirror room” by Yayoi Kusama will debut to the world in an Australian retrospective exhibition spanning eight decades of the 95-year-old Japanese artist’s extraordinary life.
Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light (2024) will feature in the exhibition, Yayoi Kusama, at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne from 15 December (until 21 April 2025).
The work uses mirrored balls to evoke the endlessness of the cosmos. The balls emanate light through small holes in a spectrum of changing colours in shades of blue and purple.
Kusama created her first infinity mirror room in the 1960s, employing mirrors to perpetually multiply the dots which have covered her paintings, sculptures and even fashion items throughout her career.
Kusama has credited the dots with relieving the mental pain of the psychiatric condition that was triggered when her mother forced her to spy on her father with his lovers.
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light (2024) © YAYOI KUSAMA Photo: Sean Fennessy
Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light (2024), is accompanied by a dedication from the artist who lives voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric institution.
“To the people of Melbourne, since birth I have always transmitted, through resplendent art, a message of love to the world,” Kusama wrote in her message.
“It is love that illuminates our lives and makes life beautiful. I aim to deliver in my art a heartfelt prayer.
“My hope is to experience the beauty of a world where peace and love have fully arrived. It is in celebration of this everlasting hope that I offer love to my eternal humankind.”
Kusama’s work has often taken the form of spotted, phallus-like objects. She has said these help her overcome her fear of the male organ.
Kusama has long been “in awe of and interested in the universe” and has created works that reflect this interest, the artist’s friend and gallerist Hidenori Ota tells The Art Newspaper.
“Kusama works closely with the technical team to ensure that her ideas and concepts are reproduced. Kusama checks the visual of the mirror room with images and videos and makes changes to achieve the desired effect,” Ota says.
He adds that future editions will be made of Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light.
“It is produced for the first time this year and will be shown for the first time at the NGV exhibition,” Ota says.
Tony Ellwood, the NGV’s director, says the exhibition will have the largest footprint of any exhibition of Kusama’s work in the world.
“It traverses the entire ground floor of NGV International and spills out on the trees on St Kilda Road in Melbourne,” Ellwood says.
A work titled Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees will envelop more than 60 plane trees in pink and white polka dots.
The exhibition will include Dancing Pumpkin, a five-metre-tall yellow and black polka-dotted bronze sculpture newly acquired by the NGV.
In addition, the gallery will use its Annual Appeal to raise funds to buy the exhibition’s new iteration of Narcissus Garden (1966/2024), which is made up of 1,400 stainless steel silver balls.
A record-breaking total of ten immersive rooms will be seen among 200 works in the exhibition.
Selections of archival ephemera, studio photographs, sketches, drawings and correspondence will offer “a candid insight into the artist’s early practice and socially engaged and politically charged performance and activism of the late 1960s”, the gallery says.
Kusama last year apologised publicly for racist comments in her 2002 autobiography, Infinity Net. The New York Times reported that the comments resurfaced just as a new exhibition of Kusama’s work opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
• Yayoi Kusama, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 15 December-21 April 2025
