For better or worse, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms reshaped the world

By Leah Dolan, CNN

(CNN) — Yayoi Kusama was an artist of many mediums — sculpture, painting, performance art and film — but many people will remember her for one body of work in particular: her “Infinity Mirror Rooms.”

The artist, whose death at age 97 was announced this Wednesday, helped to establish a new kind of immersive art primed for the Instagram age, for better or worse. She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged, and the way the public engages with them.

Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror” phenomenon reached its apex between 2012 and 2018, when each installation drew record-breaking crowds that pushed museums and galleries to their limits. Queue times for the 2018 exhibition, “Yayoi Kusama: The Moving Moment When I Went To The Universe” at Victoria Miro in London would run up to eight hours, said the gallery’s president Glenn Scott Wright in a phone interview. At The Broad in Los Angeles, when tickets went on sale in 2015 to see the permanently installed piece “Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” it crashed the site and sold out almost instantly.

“It was like tickets to a concert,” said Sarah Loyer, curator at The Broad. “We’ve never had anything else like that.”

When six of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms went on display at the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C. in 2017 — the most ever displayed together at one time — the institution’s director Melissa Chiu said it attracted 475,000 visitors, the museum’s highest attendance in 40 years. Daily lines around the block began forming at 3 a.m., and even Chiu’s Uber drivers asked about the “the mirror room show” as they dropped her off at work. (She started to carry around passes she could hand out to people who complained about being unable to book a ticket). The Hirshhorn team had to install temporary bathrooms outside in the waiting area to accommodate the swarms of people.

“We were in the business of crowd-control, rather than management, for the 12 weeks of the exhibition,” Chiu said in a phone call.

Kusama moved to the US in the late 1950s, first to Seattle and later, New York, where she was an active, although largely unknown, artist during the pop art movement. While her postwar contemporaries Andy Warhol and Donald Judd were embraced by the art establishment and booking shows at commercial galleries, Kusama struggled to gain recognition for years.

“She was twice the other,” said Scott Wright. “Not only was she a woman, but she was also Asian.”

Kusama, who had experienced vivid hallucinations since she was a child, returned to Japan in the 1970s deflated and depressed by her lack of success in the US. She checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, where she continued to produce art. The tide on her changed slowly, first with a retrospective at New York’s Center for International Contemporary Arts in 1989 and later, in 1993, with the opportunity to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale.

“It was not something that happened quickly,” Scott Wright, the London gallerist, said. He recalled his first experience exhibiting Kusama in 1998. “Nobody came,” he said over the phone. “I mean nobody came to the preview, and very few people came to the exhibition. There was zero interest.” And then, came the advent of Instagram.

By the mid-2010s, selfies snapped inside Kusama’s vast and boundless galaxies began to flood Instagram in mesmeric ubiquity. In 2014, the Guardian named her the most popular artist in the world, based on a survey of global museum attendance. The Hirshhorn, the first museum in North America to stage “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” created a hashtag to unite the visitor experience as it traveled to five other institutions. The museum reported that “#infinitekusama” reached 91 million accounts and received 330 million impressions on Instagram and X.

At one point, “every influencer had to have a photograph of themselves in a Kusama mirror room somewhere in the world,” said Scott Wright, who said he had a waitlist of 30 leading museums wanting their own Kusama show. “It was just extraordinary.”

It became clear “what visitors want to do in museums, which is to share the experience,” Chiu said.

The previously obscure Japanese artist, then an octogenarian, could not have foreseen that she would create a global social media event and usher in a new era of camera-ready participatory art. After all, her first reflective installation “Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field” was made in 1965, even if it feels uniquely designed for iPhone selfies.

Visiting Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors was, Chiu found, many people’s first experience going to a modern art museum at all. It makes sense then, that a wave of people might want to recreate that encounter — of seeing not just art, or other museum displays, but being absorbed into them. What followed peak #infinitekusama was an onslaught of “experiums” — factories, pop-ups and faux museums built to capitalize on a new, millennial-driven interest in immersive experiences and the desire to post them online. The Ice Cream Museum in New York, with its sprinkle ball pit and suspended bananas, or 29Rooms, with its elaborate stage-like photo backdrops, recreate some of the surface-level sensations an Infinity Mirror might have provoked: excitement, wonder, novelty — but without an artistic thesis. Today, our urge to “experience” art in an all-consuming way has led to a deluge of immersive “frameless” art franchises — gentle animations of the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh or Salvador Dalí projected onto huge white walls — which owe a lot to the soaring popularity of Infinity Mirrors.

At the height of the Kusama frenzy, some questioned the intellectual depth of the mirrored experiences. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith said she couldn’t decide whether Kusama was “the greatest artist to come out of the 1960s” or “a bit of a charlatan,” whose Infinity Mirrors attract “hoards of selfie-seekers oblivious to her efforts on canvas.” The rooms were part of Kusama’s ongoing exploration of self-obliteration and her career-long ambition to create work that provokes a keen awareness of both one’s individual insignificance and place in the wider cosmic system.

“It can feel really disorienting,” said The Broad’s Loyer of stepping inside one. But, she added, “there’s something meditative that can happen inside of them.”

On the question of whether snapping a selfie flattens the experience, Loyer has never thought so. “All the Infinity Rooms are sculptural works, but they really need an audience,” she said. “The body is necessary for them to be really understood and meaningful.”

That need is why, even in the ‘60s, Kusama was often photographed inside the room, with her body, dressed in a red leotard and tights, repeated ad infinitum in all directions.

“That was a big part of the way those images of the work circulated,” Loyer said. “In some ways, taking a picture inside of them… that is part of the experience.” The torrent of near-identical images shared online from all over the world, a digital nebula repeating over and over, is “another infinity out on social media” she added. “It has an interesting synergy with the concept that’s explored in the artwork itself.”

In the wake of the artist’s death, publications are already rushing to point fans to permanent Infinity Mirror installations. Are we due for Kusama-mania round two, this time with TikTok?

“I don’t think the interest has ever really died away,” said Scott Wright, listing recent exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland, the Ludwig Museum in Germany and an upcoming show at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in September. “She’s sort of in a class of her own in that way,” agreed Loyer. “The work really speaks to people. It really moves people.”

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