Yayoi Kusama

In Gleaming Lights of the Souls (2008), Yayoi Kusama’s installation for MADE UP, visitors were invited to enter a tardis-like chamber, whose small interior unfolded into a magical encounter with infinity. The small room was mirrored on all four sides, with a shallow pool of water on the floor. A changing constellation of small LED lights hung from the ceiling produced an infinite chain of endless reflections, transforming the small white cube into a distinctly otherworldly place.

The mirror is a natural material for Yayoi Kusama, whose work is well known for its compulsive repetitions of a recurring vocabulary of forms (polka dots and phallic tubers, for example) often rendered on bright yellow or red backgrounds. This obsessive patterning began on the canvas with the infinity new paintings of the late 1950s but quickly evolved into large-scale installations where every available surface was colonised by the same pattern.

In her Accumulations, the artist covered everyday objects such as chairs and tables with dense arrangements of innumerable hand-hewn phallic protuberances. Kusama’s first mirrored chamber, Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (1965) married phallic shapes with polka dots to bring the viewer into a surreal and uncomfortably close encounter with an infinite number of phallic shapes growing from the floor. In Kusama’s Peep Show (1966) infinity is held at one remove, as two small windows allow a view into a mirrored chamber where a field of multicoloured light bulbs glowing on the ceiling are reflected in the mirrored walls and floor.

Often linked with the psychedelic art movement, Kusama herself traces her obsessive and infinite patterning back to the hallucinations she began to experience as a young child in the 1930s and which continue to this day. In these, the artist’s field of vision is progressively filled with an endless multiplication of patterns that continuously replicate themselves to the obliteration of all else, including the artist. It is an experience Kusama continues symbolically to re-enact in photographs of her work, where she invariably appears dressed in a costume of identical pattern to that of her artwork. In entering one of her mirror rooms, we, like Kusama, experience the universe and ourselves obliterated in the endlessly recurring forms.

Kusama’s more recent works with mirror, including Gleaming Lights of the Souls (2008), offer a more poetic and spiritual vision of infinity, in which the terrifying multiplication of pattern gives way to a more ethereal fairytale landscape. On entering the mirrored chamber, for a moment we cross the threshold into another world, where ‘souls are soaring in the air above the water’.

Gleaming Lights of the Souls, 2008
Mixed media installation
Pilkingtons, Sparling Street, Liverpool

SUPPORTED BY

Northwest Regional Development Agency
EU-Japan Fest
The Japan Foundation
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation
Japan-UK 150
Ota Fine Arts
Bowmer and Kirkland LAGP Architects