Chapter 4

Abdullah Safar
Selected Artwork

1. NAME of Artist (or Culture): Yayoi Kusama

2. WHERE the Artist is from: Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

3. TITLE of the Artwork: Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away

4. MEDIUM of the piece: Mirror panels, LED lights, wood, metal, acrylic panel, and water

5. DATE that the piece was made: 2013

6. SIZE of the work: Approx. 12 x 12 x 12 feet (size varies by installation)

7. WHERE the piece of work resides: The Broad Museum, Los Angeles (permanent
collection)
 8. URL / WEB: https://www.thebroad.org/art/yayoi-kusama/infinity-mirrored-room-souls-
millions-light-years-away

Related Artworks

INFO List

1. NAME of Artist (or Culture): Yayoi Kusama

2. WHERE the Artist is from: Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

3. TITLE of the Artwork: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins

4. MEDIUM of the piece: Wood, mirrors, plastic/acrylic pumpkins, and LED lighting

5. DATE that the piece was made: 2016

6. SIZE of the work: Approximately 13 × 13 × 9 ft (size varies by installation)

 7. WHERE the piece of work resides: Dallas Museum of Art — the only Infinity Mirror
Pumpkin Room in a North American museum collection

8. URL / WEB ADDRESS :https://www.victoria-miro.com/news/779/

artsandculturetx.com+4victoria-miro.com+4discoverlosangeles.com+4

Info List

1. NAME of Artist (or Culture): Yayoi Kusama

2. WHERE the Artist is from: Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

3. TITLE of the Artwork: Pumpkin

4. MEDIUM of the piece: Fibre-reinforced plastic and metal, coated with urethane

5. DATE that the piece was made: 1994 (recreated in 2022 after storm damage)

6. SIZE of the work: Approximately 2 m high × 2.5 m wide (~6.5 × 8 ft)

 7. WHERE the piece of work resides: Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Naoshima Island, Kagawa
Prefecture, Japan (punctuated on a pier as a permanent outdoor installation)

8. URL / WEB ADDRESS: https://benesse-artsite.jp/en/story/20220930-2466.html

Review

Short Bio

Yayoi Kusama is a famous contemporary Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture artist in Japan. She was
born in 1929 and as a child developed an obsession with drawing and painting because she
tended to have vivid hallucinations of patterns and dots which strongly involved her art work.
Kusama had vowed never to conform to conservative Japanese society, and she relocated to
New York City in 1958 were she joined the avant-garde community of artists which included
Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg (artsy). She became known as an artist who pioneered the
“Infinity Net” paintings and radical soft-sculpture installations, mixing obsessional repetition
and psychedelic color. In the 1960s Kusama created provocative anti-war performances
including polka-dotted body paintings and hall of mirrors that erased the distinction between
art and audience. In 1973 she admitted herself voluntarily into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital
where she remained but kept a studio nearby. Throughout her career Kusama has become one
of the most successful living artists in the world (with major retrospectives at the Tate Modern
and the Hirshhorn museum, among others), her immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms have attracted
more than 5 million people around the world, confirming her ongoing legacy on contemporary
art.

Formal Analysis

Yayoi Kusama’s three works “Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years
Away”, “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins”, and “Pumpkin” demonstrate her brilliant
command of the Elements and Principles of Design to create immersive, hypnotic experiences.
Line is represented in the repetitive shapes of reflected rooms, the halos of illuminated
pumpkins and the striking figure heads of her famous outdoor sculpture. Light and value are
essential in the Infinity Rooms, LED lights set luminous changing points of brilliance that is
reflected onwards infinitely as the Broad notes, “Kusama’s mirrored environments create a
dazzling, infinite field where repeated forms and light erase boundaries between viewer and
work” (The Broad), whereas the outdoor Pumpkin uses the sun light in order to give a reflection
of its glossy and the polka dotted surface. The use of color is a signature ingredient- her intense
yellows, blacks, reds, and sharp whites form a great visual contrast highlighting her obsessive
reliance on the use of polka dots as subject and design. Texture and pattern are what glues
these works together: smooth reflective mirrors and acrylic surfaces show crisp repetition and
the dots themselves provide a mesmerizing rhythm between objects. The volumes and shapes
are also over the top, particularly in the sculptural pumpkins with their rounded organic shapes
that are simultaneously childlike and monumental (Miki). Space is craftily manipulated in the
mirrored rooms where there are no boundaries being played with and the illusion of the
mirrored rooms is of endlessness. Time and motion are incorporated in the experience of the
viewer, as you have to move during your walk through the mirrored installations as it changes
the patterns of light and reflections, and around the outdoor sculpture. Balance is precisely
calculated to produce a balance, whether this is in the scrupulously designed Infinity Rooms or
the middle placement of the Naoshima pumpkin on its pier. The rhythm is created by repetition
of the dots and the reflected ones. Proportion and scale toy with the perceptions so that tiny
pumpkins are big because of being repeated or juxtaposed to one giant pumpkin on the
background of the sea. It is emphasized on immersive environment itself but not on a single
object. The unity and diversity are achieved through repetition of various recurring patterns
polka dots, mirrors, organic shapes, etc., but it is diversified by introducing slight color and
position changes. All these together make the work of Kusama a very fascinating piece in both
the visual and obtrusive world, critical in defiant perspective of reality in the viewer.

Content Analysis

Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away”, “All the
Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins”, and “Pumpkin” are united by her distinct iconography
and symbolic systems that explore themes of infinity, self-obliteration, and psychological depth.
At the center of these pieces is the theme of polka dots, which Kusama herself has explained as
an idea of the self to dissolve into the universe, a pattern on which to infinitely disappear, a
route to infinity. The Infinity Rooms mimic the universe, in that there is illumination of infinite
mirrors that give the impression of unfathomable space, and the infinite space gives pressure to
spiritual enlightenment or the extinguishment of the ego as Kusama herself put it, “Polka dots
are a way to infinity” (hrishhorn). All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins fuses this
experiential, mirrored world with her mythic pumpkins, her comforting and nostalgic childhood
objects, yet also the symbol of the natural fertility of organic life and the joyous, surreal
freedom of her sculptures. The outdoor Pumpkin on Naoshima Island plays an analogous role as
a guiding light of whimsicality, memory, and art notation but given the fact that it has a large
and solitary shape against the sea, it can also give a certain aspect of resilience and eternity. In
all these works, Kusama multiplies basic shapes in order to induce a hypnotic space in which the
viewers have to struggle with the issues of size, identity, and death, moving such personal
obsessions and hallucinations into the meditative state (miro). She creates her own system of
symbols expressing the motif of the personal-universal duality by means of using mirrors, lights,
organic forms which create some kind of space that the viewers can lose themselves in made of
boundless gas-like structure.

Historical Context

The art of Yayoi Kusama came into existence during a period of significant social and political
upheaval: in postwar Japan and on the 1960s New York avant-garde. In the U.S. she broke the
conservative rules with her provocative happenings, protesting the Vietnam War and getting in
to the free love culture with her art as her social and political commentary, as the Hirshhorn
Museum observes, “emerged as radical interventions in 1960s art, challenging the viewer’s
sense of self and space” (hrishhorn). Her reflected spaces and her repetitive structures mirror
postwar concerns with identity, mass production and alienation. Meanwhile, her art relates to
Japanese aesthetics of simplicity and Buddhist concepts of transience and self-annihilation,
when she is obsessed with infinity and the disappearance of the individuality. On her
subsequent move to Japan in 1970s, she developed the themes of mental health and personal
trauma and became known as a revolutionary woman artist who dismantled the barriers of
culture. Kusama is a mechanism of a particular combination of Western avant-garde
experimentation and very personal even spiritual philosophy related to the position of the self
in the universe.

Works Cited

artsy. “Yayoi Kusama - 999 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy.” Www.artsy.net,
www.artsy.net/artist/yayoi-kusama.

hrishhorn. “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors | Hirshhorn Museum | Smithsonian.” Hirshhorn

Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian, 2017, hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/. Accessed 12
July 2025.

Miki, Akiko. “Yayoi Kusama: ‘Art Is an Endless Struggle, Art Is Love, Art Is Life’ （ #1 ） | Blog.”
Benesse Art Site Naoshima, 30 Sept. 2022, benesse-artsite.jp/en/story/20220930-2466.html.

miro, victoria. “Yayoi Kusama: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins at Dallas Museum of
Art.” Victoria Miro, 2017, www.victoria-miro.com/news/779/. Accessed 12 July 2025.

The Broad. “Infinity Mirrored Room - the Souls of Millions of Light Years Away - Yayoi Kusama |
the Broad.” Thebroad.org, 2014, www.thebroad.org/art/yayoi-kusama/infinity-mirrored-room-
souls-millions-light-years-away.