Everyone will want to see Yayoi Kusama at the NGV. Those who don’t will spend a lifetime regretting it

Now aged 95, Yayoi Kusama for many decades has been considered one of the most influential contemporary artists. She works across a wide range of art forms, including sculpture and installations, painting, graphic arts, fashion, video art, performance and writing.

Kusama’s immersive infinity rooms have mesmerised audiences around the world. The National Gallery of Victoria’s blockbuster exhibition sets out to rewrite the history books in its unveiling of her most recent infinity mirror work, My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light, together with nearly 200 other pieces by the artist, many never previously shown in Australia.

The earliest works in the show date from the 1930s and the most recent were made in 2024.

Kusama’s art has the rare ability to transform a personal nightmare into a vision of paradise – one that has no boundaries and defies definition through a rational intellect.

She translates her pumpkins, polka dots, river stones and flowers into a boundless universe of sensory experiences. There is no boundary between the animate and inanimate. Everything has a voice and spirit.

‘Lost in thought’

Kusama grew up on a plant nursery and flower and vegetable seed-propagating farm in rural Japan. In her autobiography, she recalls a childhood memory:

From a very young age I used to carry my sketchbook down to the seed-harvesting grounds. I would sit among the bed of violets, lost in thought.

[…]

One day I suddenly looked up to find that each and every violet had its own individual, human-like facial expression, and to my astonishment they were talking to me. The voices grew in number and volume, until the sound of them hurt my ears. I had thought that only human beings could speak, so I was surprised that the violets were using words to communicate. They were all like little human faces looking at me. I was so terrified that my legs began shaking.

Her life is punctuated with numerous hallucinations, bouts of self-doubt and depression and her desire to obliterate herself.

She reflected:

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art.

Since 1973 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital. On a daily basis, she travels to her studio to work on her art.

A profoundly moving exhibition

As with many of Kusama’s exhibitions, the show at the NGV is overwhelming. It occupies virtually the entire ground floor space of NGV International on St Kilda Road.

The immersive infinity rooms are a mind-bending experience. The recent one made in 2024, Infinity Mirrored Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light, is mesmerising and having its international premiere here in Melbourne.

The earlier piece, The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019), with its six-metre-high black tentacular forms covered in yellow polka dots is a highlight of the show, also premiering in Australia at this exhibition.

What are we to make of Kusama’s oeuvre as assembled in this huge and profoundly moving exhibition? What I did not expect from this exhibition was the sense of a prolonged cry of pain with the artist consciously seeking self-obliteration through her art.

Having experienced a traumatic childhood and being forced by her mother to spy on the infidelities of her father, Kusama expressed a revulsion to sex and in the 1960s and 1970s produced numerous works covered with flabby penises, including Ceremony for Suicide (1975–76).

Also having experienced hallucinations from an early age, by remaking these hallucinations in her art she could maintain her sanity. Although this strategy did not always work and she attempted suicide on a number of occasions.

Kusama has marketed herself as an extrovert character in her red wig, a little like Andy Warhol in his platinum wig.

Kusama appears in this guise in her video performance piece in this show, Song of a Manhattan suicide addict (2010).

Behind the extrovert glitter that runs throughout the exhibition, there is the sound of a suppressed scream of pain and the desire to lose identity by melting into infinity through the multiplicity of images endlessly repeated.

The Spirit of the Pumpkins Descended to the Heavens (2017) is one of her most obsessive and memorable pieces, where through a small viewing window you catch a glimpse of yourself endlessly repeated until you are completely obliterated and lost in infinity.

In Dots Obsession (1996/2015), you do not peer into a space but physically negotiate a space into which you are completely dissolved.

The idea is that we, or even our entire planet, is a mere dot lost within an infinity of dots.

With about ten immersive pieces in the NGV show with their kaleidoscopic infinity rooms and with very few people permitted to enter at any one moment, queues will be long and the clatter of the selfies deafening.

Yayoi Kusama is an exhibition that everyone will want to see; those who don’t will spend a lifetime regretting it.

Yayoi Kusama is at NGV International until April 21 2025.