I remember the first time I stepped into one of artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms because it felt like I’d tumbled into some fantastical realm of outer space.

Inside, the mirrored interiors, dark lighting and shallow reflective pool of water surrounding me transformed the blinking strands of colourful LED lights into an infinite cosmos of unsteady wonder. Perspective was impossible.

This was at the Liverpool Biennial in 2008: two years before the launch of Instagram, four years before Kusama’s first collaboration with French luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton and 16 years before the largest-ever exhibition of her work in the southern hemisphere would open at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) International as an irrefutable blockbuster.

Back then, I wasn’t familiar with the work of this prolific, singular Japanese artist, who is now 95 and still obsessively making work. Today, however, you only have to say “dots” or “pumpkins” and many people will recall seeing her work somewhere. Probably on Instagram.

The saturation of Kusama’s now iconic visual vocabulary throughout art, social media and fashion can sometimes feel discomforting, and certainly distracting, until you understand that making art and succeeding in the art world has been Kusama’s ambition — and obsession — for the past eight decades.

Obsessive from an early age

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, Kusama began compulsively drawing and painting from a young age. One of the earliest and most affecting works on display at the NGV is a dot-covered pencil self-portrait she drew aged 10.

These proliferating dots are a form of artistic exorcism for Kusama, who has been afflicted by visual and auditory hallucinations, anxiety and periods of disassociation since childhood.

Against the backdrop of World War II, her early years were indelibly shaped by complicated relationships with her angry, often violent, mother and her distracted, unfaithful father. In the flower beds of her family’s successful seed business, where Kusama often retreated with her sketch pad, flowers would anthropomorphise and speak to her.

In her 2002 autobiography, Infinity Net, Kusama writes eloquently and painfully of seeking obliteration and explains,: “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.”

There’s a risk of pathologising Kusama’s experience of the world and her use of art in this way and there’s an obvious catharsis to the relentless creation of her work. Later rooms in the exhibition feature salon-style hangs of the colourful canvases she now creates each day.

But to view her work exclusively through a lens of mental health is to pay a huge disservice to her artistic rigour, curiosity, ambition, and the contribution she’s made to the contemporary art world over the past seven decades.

Determined to make a mark

“My goal was to create a new history of art in the USA. That’s all I was thinking about,” Kusama has said.

In November 1955, Kusama wrote to acclaimed American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, asking for advice. Kusama had encountered her work in a book and felt an immediate affinity. O’Keeffe replied (this letter is also on display) and encouraged Kusama to travel to New York if she was serious about succeeding as an artist.

Kusama arrived in New York after a short stay in Seattle in 1958 and it’s hard to understate the significance of this time in post-war (art) history in America.

The work of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock (who died in 1956), Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko (all male, all white) was making creative and critical waves, and minimalism, happenings and the pop art movement were about to explode.

Into all this arrived Kusama, who spoke very little English and whose finances she’d smuggled out of Japan in the lining of her kimono. In Infinity Kusama, Heather Lenz’s 2018 documentary portrait of the artist, British and American gallerists and curators reflect on the inevitable sexism and racism Kusama encountered as she doggedly and literally carried her art to galleries across the city.

There’s a deeply evocative part of a work on display early in the NGV exhibition that says so much about the scale of Kusama’s ambition and her steadfast determination in spite of these obstacles, as well as her early attempts to capture a sense of the infinite.

It’s a large scroll of canvas — 30cm by 10m — that had to be cut from the bottom of a since-lost painting because it simply wouldn’t fit through the doors of Stephen Radich Gallery in 1961.

The offcut is accompanied by an archival photograph of a diminutive Kusama standing in front of this wildly expansive, monochromatic canvas.

Contemplating her Infinity Net paintings today, you can sense the origins of her later Infinity Rooms. With their swarms of tiny, looped brushstrokes, these mesmerising canvases seem to hum and undulate before your eyes.

Expansive obsessions

US artist and critic Donald Judd was one of the first to recognise Kusama’s originality, and the minimalist painter Frank Stella was another early collector of her work. Only four years after arriving in New York she was exhibiting in group shows alongside artists including James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

The NGV wall texts don’t make these and other connections explicit but Lenz’s documentary makes a compelling case for Kusama’s claim to have influenced Oldenburg’s iconic turn towards soft sculptures and Warhol’s use of wallpapered repeating imagery, both techniques of which she employed in her first room-scaled installation, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963). A later iteration of this milestone work, Walking on the Sea of Death (1981), is on display at the NGV.

Kusama began making these phallic soft sculptures, which she called Accumulations, in 1961. They would overtake furniture, ladders and even clothing, to become a recurring motif in her work. Several significant works, such as Untitled (Chair) (1963) are included in the exhibition.

That they look like penises is not an accident. 

Kusama has described their making as a form of self-therapy; a means to overcome a fear and disgust of sex shaped by her cultural upbringing and education, and the accidental witnessing of a sex act when she was younger. In her autobiography, she explains: “Reproducing the objects, again and again, was my way of conquering the fear.”

In the late 1960s, Kusama began making experimental films and staging orgies and public performances that all featured her trademark dots.

These “Kusama Happenings” were further explorations of her fascination with the naked body, but they were also a response to the wider counter-cultural movement of free love and brewing anti-war sentiment. 

That her work can hold such seemingly disparate intentions speaks again to her expansive obsessions and creative dexterity.

Buy your narcissism

The extent of Kusama’s early forays into fashion is another revelation in the exhibition and helps to mitigate some of my general misgivings about artist collaborations with high-end fashion brands. 

I’m still not going to spend $25 on a pair of pumpkin socks and I definitely can’t afford a limited edition Yayoi Kusama Louis Vuitton handbag, but the first half of this chronologically curated exhibition does introduce visitors to the breadth and material richness of Kusama’s practice. 

It offers a series of visual and thematic anchors that help to frame the latter half of the exhibition and the sprawling directions her work continues to take, even as it starts to veer sometimes towards feeling more like a brand than a practice.

Kusama has long intuited trends in the art world. One of my favourite of her works, Narcissus Garden, is also one of her most definitive. First staged at the 1966 Venice Biennale, Kusama scattered 1,500 gleaming silver balls on the grass in front of the Italian pavilion with a sign inviting visitors to “buy their narcissism” for $2 apiece. 

Wanting to sell her art “like ice cream or hot dogs”, her intervention was a deft critique of the art world that was ultimately shut down by Biennale officials. Nearly 30 years later, in 1993, Kusama would triumphantly return to Venice to officially represent Japan.

Narcissus Garden is the first work to greet visitors inside Federation Court where the balls warp and refract hundreds of reflections of her giant dancing pumpkin. 

That Narcissus Garden is also the focus of the NGV’s 2024 Annual Appeal, a philanthropic drive to acquire major works for the collection, feels wonderfully ironic. But as a work connecting the two halves of this expansive exhibition it also captures the deftness and ability of her work to be many things at once: funny and sad. Clever and simple. Tactile and slick. Deeply personal and genuinely universal.

Stepping into Kusama’s universe

The NGV has understandably made much of the exhibition’s monumental firsts — it’s the biggest show of Kusama’s work in the southern hemisphere; it has the largest exhibition footprint anywhere; and the greatest number of infinity rooms ever. This hype feels a natural part of the Kusama universe today where, around the world, hundreds of people queue for hours at a time to step into one of her Infinity Rooms.

These kinds of immersive exhibition experiences are increasingly the norm for museums looking to leverage social media and changing audience behaviours to expand their reach, and Kusama has absolutely been at the forefront of this. Her first participatory mirrored work, Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field was made in 1965. It’s not shown at the NGV but there are still 10 other rooms to experience.

I can’t remember how long I had inside the Infinity Room in Liverpool back in 2008, but the NGV will be giving people a brisk 30 seconds in groups of six to eight and queue-management systems are in place to help shuffle people through. It can start to feel uncomfortably like an amusement park.

Kusama’s invitation to the people of Melbourne (as per the wall text) is to experience love. “It is Love that illuminates our lives and makes life beautiful,” she writes.

That’s not a sentiment you can rush, and when her genuinely dazzling Infinity Rooms are punctuated by queues of people and video poems about suicide and antidepressants, the precariousness of love and her own search for infinite beauty feels genuinely fraught. That’s not a criticism of Kusama’s work or her substantial achievements, or even the exhibition as a whole.

It’s more an observation of just some of the many multitudes that her work and world contain. Something you could literally reflect on in her Infinity Rooms if you were allowed the time, and maybe put your phone away.

The exhibition Yayoi Kusama is at NGV International, Melbourne, until April 21, 2025.