Immerse Yourself in the Polka-Dotted World of Yayoi Kusama at a Massive New Retrospective

For the past eight decades, Yayoi Kusama has been dazzling art lovers around the world with her giant polka-dotted sculptures and immersive “infinity mirror rooms.”

Now, a new exhibition in Australia contemplates the 95-year-old Japanese artist’s legacy. Titled “Yayoi Kusama,” the retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne is thought to be one of the largest exhibitions featuring the artist’s work in the world, according to the Art Newspaper’s Elizabeth Fortescue.

The show includes a new piece called Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart is Filled to the Brim With Sparkling Light. Created in Kusama’s signature style, the work includes mirrored balls dotted with small holes. Light emanates from the holes in various shades of blue, purple, red and green.

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Kusama dedicated the piece “to the people of Melbourne” and explained that she hopes her art sends a “message of love to the world.”

“It is love that illuminates our lives and makes life beautiful,” she wrote. “I aim to deliver in my art a heartfelt prayer. My hope is to experience the beauty of a world where peace and love have fully arrived. It is in celebration of this everlasting hope that I offer love to my eternal humankind.”

The artist produced her first infinity mirror room in 1965, according to the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. These perceptual pieces use mirrors to reflect images and light, creating mesmerizing patterns.

This kind of repetition can also be seen in many of Kusama’s other pieces. She often incorporates polka dots into sculptures, paintings, fashion apparel and installations. Kusama has said that she uses dots as a way to cope with intrusive visual hallucinations that began when she was a child. Since 1977, she has voluntarily lived at a psychiatric treatment facility in Tokyo.

“Nowadays, art therapy is all the rage,” Wayne Crothers, the gallery’s senior curator of Asian art, tells the Guardian’s Sian Cain. “But even when she was a child, she found the production of art very therapeutic.”

By channeling her mental health struggles into her work, Kusama was able to “[harness] her obsession into something awe-inspiring,” he adds.

Beyond the infinity mirror room, the new exhibition also includes nearly 200 of Kusama’s works—including some she made as a child in the 1930s. Curators also use photographs, sketches, letters and other archival materials to help tell the story of Kusama’s long and prolific career.

“We wanted to show people that you don’t just arrive at the point of giant pumpkins and infinity rooms instantaneously,” Crothers tells the Guardian. “This is a life pursuit that spans eight and a half decades. And I don’t think there’s ever been another artist that you could do that with, in the whole world.”

Other highlights include Dancing Pumpkin (2020), a 16-foot-tall bronze gourd with tentacle-like legs covered in yellow and black dots that the museum recently acquired. Narcissus Garden (1966/2024), a new version of one of Kusama’s sculptural installations, immerses museumgoers in 1,400 stainless steel silver balls. The gallery is raising funds to be able to buy the piece, per the Art Newspaper.

The exhibition also includes The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019), an immersive experience featuring worm-shaped forms covered in yellow dots that are nearly 20 feet tall.

Another piece, called Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees, is located outside on the road in front of the gallery. To celebrate the new show, Kusama wrapped 60 plane trees in custom white and pink polka-dot fabric.

The retrospective is “profoundly moving,” writes Sasha Grishin, an art historian at Australian National University, in the Conversation. “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.”

“Yayoi Kusama” is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne through April 21, 2025.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.