the infinity mirror rooms

In honour of Yayoi Kusama’s birthday this week, our art piece for today is her Infinity Mirror Rooms!

Born in Matsumoto, rural Japan, Yayoi started drawing pumpkins in middle school and creating artwork from her hallucinations. Growing up in an abusive household, Yayoi would often experience intense visions of flowers, flashes of lights and dots. These would later influence her artwork where she channeled her traumatic childhood, and her experience growing up during war time.

After studying painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, Yayoi gained prominence for depicting abstract natural forms using watercolour and oil, painting the polka dots from her hallucinations she called “infinity nets” for which she is now known for.

Attracted by the American Abstract Impressionism movement in New York, she moved there in 1958 and became a key figure of the avant-garde scene in the 60s.

In 1963, she started her series of Infinity Mirror installations. Using mediums ranging from stuffed cotton, wood, light bulbs, LED lights, acrylic, balloons and metal, Yayoi has created more than twenty installations of mirrored rooms designed to allow the viewer to explore the illusion of infinite space through kaleidoscopic environments.

The art pieces also offer an opportunity to explore the themes often surrounding Yayoi’s work, including life and its aftermath, mental state and sexuality.

Through her artwork, Yayoi has been able to express her state as an “outsider” whether it be  as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own mental health symptoms.