Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms Changed How We Experience Art

Yayoi Kusama was an artist of many mediums — sculpture, painting, performance art and film — but many people will remember her for one body of work in particular: her “Infinity Mirror Rooms.”

The artist, whose death at age 97 was announced this Wednesday, helped establish a new kind of immersive art that became particularly well suited to the Instagram era. She created more than 20 versions of her mirrored chambers, using light, sculpture and reflection to create a seemingly endless 360-degree environment.

The installations traveled around the world and became enormously popular, changing both the types of exhibitions museums stage and how visitors interact with them.

Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror” phenomenon reached its peak between 2012 and 2018, when individual installations drew record-breaking crowds.

At a 2018 exhibition at Victoria Miro in London, visitors could face wait times of up to eight hours, according to gallery president Glenn Scott Wright. At The Broad in Los Angeles, tickets for the permanently installed “Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” sold out almost immediately after the website crashed under the demand.

“It was like tickets to a concert,” said Sarah Loyer, curator at The Broad. “We’ve never had anything else like that.”

When six of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms went on display at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2017 — the most ever displayed together at one time — the exhibition attracted 475,000 visitors, the museum’s highest attendance in 40 years.

Lines began forming around the block in the early morning hours, and museum officials had to install temporary bathrooms for visitors waiting to get inside.

“We were in the business of crowd-control, rather than management, for the 12 weeks of the exhibition,” said Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu.

Kusama moved to the United States in the late 1950s, first settling in Seattle and later New York. She worked during the height of the Pop Art movement but struggled to receive the same recognition as contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Donald Judd.

Scott Wright said Kusama faced additional barriers as both a woman and an Asian artist.

After returning to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama continued producing art while living at a psychiatric hospital. Her recognition grew gradually, with a major retrospective in New York in 1989 followed by her selection to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993.

Then came Instagram.

By the mid-2010s, images of visitors taking selfies inside Kusama’s mirrored environments were appearing across social media in enormous numbers. In 2014, The Guardian named her the most popular artist in the world based on global museum attendance.

The Hirshhorn created a hashtag for its “Infinity Mirrors” exhibition as it traveled to other museums. The institution said the hashtag reached 91 million accounts and generated 330 million impressions on Instagram and X.

“At one point, every influencer had to have a photograph of themselves in a Kusama mirror room somewhere in the world,” Scott Wright said.

The popularity also revealed something about what audiences wanted from museums.

“It became clear what visitors want to do in museums, which is to share the experience,” Chiu said.

Kusama's first reflective installation, “Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field,” was created in 1965, decades before smartphones and social media. Yet the immersive work proved almost perfectly suited to the age of online sharing.

For some visitors, the installations represented their first experience with modern art. Their popularity helped fuel a broader movement toward immersive exhibitions and “experiums,” including pop-ups and attractions designed around participatory, camera-ready experiences.

Critics questioned whether some of those newer attractions captured the intellectual depth of Kusama’s work. Her Infinity Rooms were rooted in her exploration of self-obliteration and the relationship between individual identity and the larger universe.

The rooms can be disorienting, but they can also be meditative, Loyer said.

And she does not believe taking photographs necessarily diminishes the experience.

“All the Infinity Rooms are sculptural works, but they really need an audience,” she said. “The body is necessary for them to be really understood and meaningful.”

In that sense, the photographs and selfies generated by visitors became part of the larger phenomenon surrounding Kusama’s work. The endless stream of nearly identical images online created what Loyer described as another kind of infinity on social media.

Following Kusama’s death, interest in her work remains strong, with museums continuing to stage exhibitions featuring her installations.

“She’s sort of in a class of her own in that way,” Loyer said. “The work really speaks to people. It really moves people.”