Yayoi Kusama: disappearing into infinity

It is difficult to think of a contemporary artistic language more immediately recognisable than Yayoi Kusama’s. A field of polka dots, a yellow pumpkin covered in black spots, or a room multiplied by mirrors is often enough. Yet stopping at the surface would mean missing almost everything. Born in Matsumoto in 1929 and initially trained in the traditional Japanese style of Nihonga, Kusama transformed repetition into a way of questioning something much larger than the image itself: the boundary between the individual and the world. She moved to New York in 1958, drawn by the experimental postwar art scene, and the following year began producing her monumental Infinity Nets, canvases covered by thousands of repeated loops until the limits of the surface almost disappear.

For Kusama, repetition was never simply a pattern. During the 1960s it progressively invaded objects, bodies, and entire environments. Her soft Accumulation sculptures emerged, while from 1967 she staged happenings in which participants were covered with polka dots and her visual universe entered locations including Central Park, the Museum of Modern Art, and even the New York Stock Exchange.

Kusama uses the idea of self-obliteration: symbolically dissolving the boundaries of the self through repetition until body and environment become part of the same visual field. Tate records one of her clearest formulations: polka dots are a way to infinity. Where do we end, and where does everything around us begin?

In 1965, this research reached a decisive turning point with Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field. Mirrors allowed Kusama to physically realise what the Infinity Nets had already attempted on canvas: repetition with no visible endpoint. The visitor no longer remains in front of the artwork. They enter it and see their own image multiplied alongside everything else. The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum identifies this first Infinity Mirror Room as a breakthrough precisely because repetition became a perceptual experience.

Here lies one of the most fascinating paradoxes in Kusama’s story. A language built around the dissolution of individuality became an unmistakable signature. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with a mirrored environment filled with pumpkins; in the decades that followed, pumpkins, polka dots, and Infinity Mirror Rooms entered global visual culture.

The scale of her popularity is now both institutional and popular in the broadest sense. The major National Gallery of Victoria retrospective in Melbourne, open from December 2024 to April 2025 and featuring around 200 works, attracted more than 570,000 visitors and set a new attendance record for the museum. Can art created to dissolve the ego survive becoming a global icon?

The Infinity Mirror Rooms seem almost perfectly designed for the smartphone era: immersive, immediately photographable, recognisable within seconds. Yet they were created decades before social media. Reducing them to their photogenic appeal would therefore mean reading the past backwards. When Kusama constructed her first mirrored room in 1965, she was searching for a physical form for ideas already present in her paintings: infinity, repetition, obsession, and the dissolution of individual boundaries.

The fact that millions of people now want to photograph themselves inside an artwork conceived around the dissolution of the self adds another layer to the question. We enter infinity, and the first thing we still look for is our own image.

After returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama continued working across painting, sculpture, installation, literature, and poetry. In 2009 she began My Eternal Soul, a series that reached roughly 900 paintings by 2021; that same year she started Every Day I Pray for Love. Her official website describes the continuity of her practice through nature, love, life, death, and infinity.

Perhaps this persistence explains why her work has moved through such different eras without belonging completely to any one of them. Behind the familiar image of the polka dot remains an ancient question: what does it mean to be an individual within something immeasurably larger? Kusama has spent a lifetime answering by filling canvases, bodies, and rooms until their boundaries disappear. And yet, when we stand before the mirrors, we still search for ourselves.