Few artists have transfigured personal trauma into a universally resonant language quite like Yayoi Kusama. Over seven decades, she has built an artistic universe where obsession becomes transcendence, where repetition is both a means of control and a portal to infinity. Her oeuvre - at once deeply personal and profoundly cosmic - stands as a testament to art’s ability to dissolve the self into something larger, something uncontainable. Kusama's work defies traditional categorization, spanning and subverting Minimalism, Pop Art, and Abstract Expressionism while remaining entirely singular. At the core of her practice lies an insatiable pursuit of obliteration - not as destruction, but as a pathway to unity with the vast and unknowable.
The National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) exhibition, running until April 8, 2024, offers one of the most immersive and conceptually rich Kusama experiences ever staged. It is not merely a retrospective; it is an odyssey into the mind of an artist who has spent her life mapping the infinite. Unlike previous Kusama showcases, which have often fixated on her most iconic installations in isolation, NGV’s curation emphasizes the full breadth and evolution of her artistic lexicon - drawing deeper connections between the formal, philosophical, and emotional undercurrents that pulse through her work.
A key highlight of this exhibition is the unveiling of a newly commissioned Infinity Mirror Room, created exclusively for the NGV. While Kusama’s mirrored chambers have become cultural touchstones, endlessly photographed and endlessly shared, this iteration pushes the experience into new, more disorienting territory. Here, advanced lighting techniques and spatial illusions amplify the paradox at the heart of her work: the sensation of both infinite expansion and overwhelming enclosure. Standing within this space is akin to floating untethered in a celestial void, where perception folds in on itself, and the self dissolves into a flickering constellation of light. It is a moment of existential vertigo, a confrontation with the sublime wrapped in Kusama’s signature kaleidoscopic wonder.
Beyond the gallery’s walls, NGV’s curators have transformed the museum’s façade into a Kusama-infused spectacle, extending her vision into public space. Towering biomorphic forms, pulsating with her trademark polka dots, stretch across the exterior - a surreal, organic intervention into the rigid architecture of the museum. This immersive gesture plays with the boundaries of inside and outside, public and private, reality and hallucination. It underscores Kusama’s belief that art should be lived, that it should spill beyond the canvas and into the fabric of existence itself.
The exhibition also features an expanded presentation of Kusama’s celebrated pumpkin sculptures, displayed in an environment that deepens their mythic presence. For Kusama, the pumpkin is more than just a recurring motif - it is an emblem of comfort, a relic from her rural childhood in Japan, imbued with both nostalgia and an uncanny, almost spiritual resonance.
At NGV, these gourds swell into the surreal, their exaggerated scale transforming them into totemic entities - somewhere between dream and memory, between nature and imagination. They sit at the precipice of reality, evoking the fantastical worlds of Lewis Carroll or Studio Ghibli, where the ordinary morphs into the extraordinary.
Perhaps the most profound and unexpected facet of this exhibition is its inclusion of Kusama’s early works, personal writings, and lesser-known artistic experiments, offering a rare glimpse into the psychological and philosophical origins of her practice. These archival materials illuminate the tensions that have shaped her career: her self-imposed exile from Japan to New York, her battles with mental illness, and her radical interventions in the art world. In this context, her polka dots cease to be mere patterns and become something deeper - symbols of an obsessive mind striving to make sense of infinity, to organize chaos into beauty.
What sets NGV’s Kusama exhibition apart is its ability to frame her work as both deeply personal and profoundly universal. It reveals the delicate balance she strikes between whimsy and weight, between childlike wonder and existential dread. In an era of digital oversaturation, where selfhood is constantly fragmented and refracted through screens, Kusama’s Infinity Rooms feel eerily prescient - a physical manifestation of the endless loops of online existence, where identity is replicated and dispersed into oblivion.
Yet, despite their dizzying spectacle, Kusama’s works are not just about losing oneself; they are about finding a new way to be. To step into her world is to confront the vastness of the cosmos and, paradoxically, to feel an intimate connection to it. In her mirrored infinities, we glimpse something beyond ourselves - something boundless, timeless, and immeasurably beautiful. The NGV’s exhibition does not merely showcase Kusama’s art; it immerses us in her vision of the universe, where the self, the world, and the infinite are one and the same.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of AW.