Yayoi kusama infinity mirror rooms

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms

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Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room — Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011/2017 Tate Presented by the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro 2015, accessioned 2019 © YAYOI KUSAMA

Step into infinite space

Tate presents a rare chance to experience two of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. These immersive installations will transport you into Kusama’s unique vision of endless reflections.

Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life is one of Kusama’s largest installations to date and was made for her 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern. It is shown alongside Chandelier of Grief, a room which creates the illusion of a boundless universe of rotating crystal chandeliers.

A small presentation of photographs and moving image – some on display for the first time – provides historical context for the global phenomenon that Kusama’s mirrored rooms have become today.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama came to international attention in 1960s New York for a wide-ranging creative practice that has encompassed installation, painting, sculpture, fashion design and writing. Since the 1970s she has lived in Tokyo, where she continues to work prolifically and to international acclaim.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms is presented in The George Economou Gallery. This exhibition is in partnership with Bank of America, with additional support from Uniqlo.

Please read our safety guidelines below before you visit.

Kusama Lunch experience

Choose the 12.00 or 12.15 entry to the exhibition and enjoy a Yayoi Kusama-inspired lunch in the Kitchen and Bar afterwards.

• £35 for exhibition entry and two course lunch.
• £25 for Members and Supporters.

Exhibition guides

Our exhibition guide explores the exhibition room by room.

Need a bigger font size of the exhibition guide? Download the large print version [PDF, 428.04 KB]

Accessibility

Tate Modern’s entrance is via the Turbine Hall on Holland Street. There are automatic sliding doors and a ramp down to the entrance.

The Exhibition is on Level 4 of the Blavatnik Building. There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Nathalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.

• Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses.
• A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4.
• Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks.

For more information before your visit:

Call +44 (0)20 7887 8888 – option 1 (daily 09.45–18.00)

Safety guidelines

Visitor numbers are being carefully managed to ensure that your visit is as safe and comfortable as possible. There are increased cleaning regimes in high use areas and protective screens on desks and counters. We are only accepting card or contactless payments and have installed hand sanitiser dispensers throughout the gallery.

When you visit:

All visitors are required to wear face coverings in our galleries, apart from those who are exempt. Not all exemptions are visible so please be understanding of others.

Most importantly if you are feeling unwell, help keep everyone safe by staying at home.

Источник

‘My cheapo garden fairy lights do this too’ – Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms

Tate Modern, London
The Japanese artist turns her visual hallucinations into a flaring and dimming clockwork universe. But I seem to be immune. Perhaps if I brought a small child or was interested in taking selfies …

A short trip . Yayoi Kusama’s Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011/2017. Photograph: Eduardo Ortega/Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro

A short trip . Yayoi Kusama’s Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011/2017. Photograph: Eduardo Ortega/Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro

Last modified on Mon 17 May 2021 15.54 BST

A ll done with lights and looking glasses, Yayoi Kusama’s year-long display of Infinity Mirror Rooms is already booked-out until late October. Viewers must queue and wait, at £10 a head, for two, two-minute dives into Kusama’s universe. Hardly enough time to get your bearings, let alone lose them, which seems to be the point of her disorientating halls of mirrors.

Tate Modern says it is being relatively generous about how long viewers may spend in the artist’s installations: at some venues, visitors get only 30 seconds to adjust to her glimmering darkened spaces. Then you’re out, matey, ready or not, wowed or otherwise. Time for a selfie though, if that’s your thing. And for many, I fear, it is. Although such installations are perceptually complex and disorientating, their spectacular effects are all too readily assimilable to Instagram. This really is a bit absurd. Many people are hungry, I suppose, for some kind of transformative, mystical or even transcendental experience, and one that requires neither fasting nor drugs, let alone months or years of mental and physical preparation. Inner visions, like dreams, are no good as selfie opportunities. They’re all in your head.

Kusama’s art is driven by her inner experiences, reporting back on things only the mind can see. Beset by visual hallucinations, Kusama has for almost the entirety of her long life been prey to proliferating and insistent visual disturbances. She has found ways to accommodate her fixations and subjective perceptions of unseen forces into her work, using it as source, material and energy.

Thrown rainbows … Chandelier of Grief 2016/2018. Photograph: Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro

Walking into her Chandelier of Grief, I never quite lose my sense of planes, edges and boundaries, the black carpet under my feet, the hexagonal chamber containing a slowly revolving crystal chandelier, its lights flaring and dimming, the crystals throwing fleeting little rainbows of colour here and there. The multiple mirrored reflections seemingly revolving alternately clockwise and anticlockwise, flattening out along the horizontal plane and simultaneously plunging below us and soaring ever upward over our heads. It is as if we were in a clockwork universe of endlessly proliferating, rotating gears, a Keplerian machine of cycles and epicycles which has no end, all of which sounds a great deal more engaging than I actually found it.

In her larger, the walk-through Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life, little hanging lights glow and dim as they cycle through their programmed sequence of colour changes. My cheapo garden fairy lights do that too, even when I don’t want them to. As well as mirrors and a walkway, reflecting pools of water redouble the confusion. The mechanics of Kusama’s looking-glass theatres snag me, but not in particularly interesting ways. The staging of her lights and mirrors remind me less of star-fields or pinging neurons and networks of firing synapses, as of airports or refineries at night, or of being E-ed up and bathing in a disco glow, or being caught in a silent killing field of computer-game tracer fire and sci-fi force fields. None of which I plan to do any time soon. Beam me up and get me out of here before I faint from the excitement of it all.

Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms just don’t do it for me. I appear to be immune to them. Maybe I’d appreciate them more if I visited with a small child, and could share in their easy wonderment, except I’d worry they might drown in one of those shallow pools. Maybe a drawn-out expectation of the moment, the booking, the waiting for the day and the minute, all that queuing, might help develop a sense of occasion.

Inner experiences … Yayoi Kusama in 2013. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

Kusama’s light installations are the main event here, and are augmented by series of portrait photographs of the artist, taken over her long career, as well as pictures of performances, which are both sexy and silly, earnest and ridiculous. In a recently rediscovered short film by British academic John Jones, we see a young Kusama walking in red thigh-length boots about her studio, posing behind a stepladder festooned with little sculptures and high-heeled shoes, and lying naked from the waist down in a nest of white phallic sculptures, kapok-stuffed white gloves and other floppy forms.

As much her work looks back to surrealism, the film, shot in the mid-1960s, has both a touching innocence and an oddly prurient feel that some might take as period charm. How long you can linger to see all this, and the box-like recent sculpture whose peepholes afford colourful views of globular little dots, before the next punters are shepherded through, I cannot say.

Источник

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms

Two Way Mirrors

Mar 12 · 6 min read

“Accumulation is the result of my obsession and that philosophy is the main theme of my art. Accumulation means the stars in the universe don’t exist by themselves nor does the earth exist by itself. ” -Yayoi Kusama

From Phalli’s Field, all the way to Everyday I Pray for Love, Yayoi Kusama has made her name well known over the years. Kusama’s art has been displayed all over the world — in fact, she even has a whole museum dedicated to her in Japan!

Yayoi Kusama’s art is filled with trauma, betrayal, and obsession. However, she is able to display some of the worst feelings into beautiful, mesmerizing rooms that swallow your mind and soul.

Here is a complete list of all of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrored rooms:

1965 — Phalli’s Field

Yayoi Kusa m a’s first infinity room, Phalli’s Field, was one worth noticing in the art world. With hundreds of hand-sewn, phallus-like figures filling the room, Kusama grew tired of sewing and stuffing. In fact, she spent a lot of her time between 1962–1964 sewing these! This is when she had the brilliant idea of turning her display into an infinity mirror room — infinite stuffed figures with only half of the sewing involved. Another amazing aspect of this installation was that the viewer was able to be a part of it. Standing in the middle of the room, the viewer appears to be surrounded by a sea of red polka dots.

Artist Factoid: Kusama’s mother would have her spy on her father’s affairs, which led to a lifelong aversion to sex — thus giving the inspiration to multiple phallic related pieces of work.

1966 — Love Forever

Unlike Kusama’s first installation, this is not an interactive room. Rather than waking into the illusion, visitors will look through two small peepholes located on the side of the room. There are two, so you can bring a friend!

There’s an old superstition that says if Newlyweds look into a mirror after being freshly married, their souls will be united forever. The magical lighting in this room doubled with the mirrors all around makes for a magical experience. Just don’t be alarmed if you see your face a few dozen times!

1996 — Repetitive Vision

In this room, you’ll have company. Leaning more towards the simplistic side of things, the floor is white and covered in red polka dots that vary in size. Just like the others, it is surrounded by mirrors. However, unlike the others, there are mannequins in the room!

The mannequins match the floor pattern with white bodies and red dots. The room is lacking lighting, except for a few orbs of light hanging from the ceiling. This one has a more eerie feeling, but art is supposed to make you feel something — right?

1996 — Infinity Dots Mirrored Room

This room has a unique factor in the sense that you’re legitimately surrounded by mirrors. Kusama opted to have mirrors not only all around the room, but a mirror on the ceiling as well.

The installation has polka dots on the floor, much like the Repetitive Vision installation. What makes this room so unique is the lighting! There are black lights installed in the room, making the dots surrounding you glow vibrantly. It’s more on the simplistic side, but beautiful nonetheless.

2002 — The Obliteration Room

The Obliteration Room is my personal Yayoi Kusama favorite. It features a white room full of colorful dotted stickers! When you walk in the room, you are given a sticker and you can place it on the art! Who said you can’t touch the art? 😉

2002 — Fireflies on the Water

Fireflies on the Water is a unique room that includes wood, water, and beautiful fairy lights. The exhibit surrounds you with lights above the water, creating a “fire-fly” illusion. You stand on a wooden platform that looks like you are standing on a dock on water.

2002 — Soul Under the Moon

This installation is a dark room that is full of neon colored lights that fill the air! The lights hang and dangle all around you creating an “under the moon” experience.

2007 — Love Transformed Into Dots

A mirrored room full of light-up, pink balls covered in black polka-dots. The floor and ceiling is also pink covered in black polka-dots ! If pink is your favorite color, than this is definitely the room for you!

2008 — Gleaming Lights of the Souls

Lights and water are used in this infinity mirror exhibit as well! The room itself is four by four meters, and you stand on a platform similar to Fireflies on the Water. However, the lights in this room are more round like ping-pong balls rather than the stringy fairy lights in Fireflies on the Water. They are like glowing, floating souls all around you!

2009 — Aftermath of the Obliteration of Eternity

Beautiful, warm lantern-like lights fill this room into eternity. Some people say it is like looking into a summer sunrise, and others compare it to a lantern festival when you let lanterns float away into the sky at night. Beautiful!

2013 — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away

The lights in this infinity mirror room are very small and frail. The title of the exhibit summarizes it’s aesthetic perfectly. The lights are hanging from the ceiling and make you feel like you’re inside a galaxy!

2013 — Love is Calling

Kusama combined her sculpture abilities into this infinity mirror room. She created large, colorful neon spirals that illuminate the infinity mirror room! The sculptures are different colors, and give the room a pop-art vibe.

2014 — Brilliance of the Souls

Absolutely brilliant — if you ask me. This room uses larger multi-colored balls of light that illuminate the room. The materials of the room include mirrors, wooden panels, LED, metal, acrylic panels, and water.

Stepping into this room makes you feel like you are surrounded by beautiful orbs that are simply there to put you in awe.

2016 — All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins

This is another one of my favorite rooms! The pumpkins are made out of an acrylic substance and are covered in black polka-dots!

It’s like walking through the coolest pumpkin patch EVER!

2017 — Let’s Survive Forever

Let’s Survive forever is unlike Kusama’s other infinity mirrored rooms. The room is fully lit, and reflective spheres are hanging from the ceiling as well as placed along the floor.

These reflective orbs are arranged all around the room, and there is also a reflective pillar in the middle of the room as well. This creates the illusion that you are surrounded by mirrored orbs all around you!

2017 — Longing for Eternity

You cannot actually enter this infinity mirror room. Why? Because it is actually a hexagonal chamber that is filled with multi-colored changing lights!

The chamber has holes — windows — that you can look through to view the infinity effect. The lights are arranged in the symmetrical hexagon shape, so it is very satisfying to watch it change colors!

2018 — My Heart is Dancing into the Universe

Included in this exhibit are multiple paper lanterns that have holes cut in them allowing light to shine through. The lanterns are spherical and are hanging from the ceiling.

The spheres change colors, thus creating the effect of being absorbed into an infinite reality of dots and light.

2018 — Light of Life

Similar to Longing for Eternity, Light of Life is an infinity mirrored room that you peer into rather than enter.

Small, circular lights are placed on the top and bottom of the art installation. The lights are different colors that blink very quickly. When you pop your head into the chamber, you enter the speed of light.

2019 — Dancing Lights that Flew Up to the Universe

Sincerely stunning — the recent infinity mirror room collects the warmth of a sunset without the use of the sun. This infinity mirror room is full of relaxation and energy combined.

How does she do it?

Her art truly is one of a kind. The idea of placing a bunch of mirrors together to create an infinite room is truly original and beautiful.

She used many different materials, but some are actually easier to find than you think!

If building an infinity mirror room is something you would like to achieve, than finding the glass and acrylic first surface mirrors can be found places like https://www.twowaymirrors.com/.

Creating lights and sculptures will require tools as well. You can find clay, paper, lights, and other accessories at your local craft store!

You can even create a smaller infinity mirror if you’re simply inspired by the infinity effect but are unsure about dedicating a whole room to it!

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