By Hadia Chaudhry
The Infinity Mirror Rooms, created by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, opened at the Broad Museum in Downtown Los Angeles on October 21. The exhibit will be on display at the Broad until January 1. There will continue to be long lines due to the limited number of tickets.
Sixty of Kusama’s paintings and sculptures will be featured alongside the famous mirror rooms. Six of the twenty rooms are up for display for spectators to enjoy.
“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” as the exhibit is called, has traveled to two other locations in the US: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Seattle Art Museum. The Broad in Los Angeles is the third stop for the exhibit during its North American tour, where it will be showcased in five well-known museums throughout the U.S. and Canada.
The Broad is the permanent home for one of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room installments, “Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.” The uniqueness of the mirror-clad room filled with elegant twinkling lights has made it a popular site for visitors. The room has been Instagrammed by a number of celebrities as well, making Kusama’s exhibit a highly anticipated exhibit for its beauty and popular appeal.
The mirror rooms, the highlights of the exhibit, are each about the size of a storage shed. The rooms are made of relatively simple materials, such as wood, metal, boards, stuffed cloth, and light bulbs. However, each room showcases different intricate displays surrounded by mirrors, giving the illusion of an infinitely expanding room.
One room displays a polka-dotted orb hanging serenely while another is enveloped in the light of golden lanterns floating in the dark, resembling the floating lantern scene in the Disney movie “Tangled.”
The rooms are spaced out among Kusama’s other works in order to give visitors time to unwind from the mirrors and appreciate her sculptures and framed works as well.
The unique experience in the Infinity Mirror Rooms may be difficult to capture on camera since visitors are only allowed into the rooms in groups of two and have 30 seconds to take any pictures they wish.
Due to an incident in Hirshorn in which an overly enthusiastic visitor accidentally shattered one of Kusama’s sculptures, no cameras and phones are allowed in one of the mirror rooms, “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins.”
As an artist, Kusama is very reserved and does not grant many interviews. The mysterious air around the 66-year old woman adds to the mystique of her mirror rooms, the first of which was created in 1965 and is known as “Phalli’s Fields.” Kusama is well known for being a precursor to the pop art and minimalist art movements. She has been exhibited with other contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
The Infinity Mirror Rooms will give visitors an unforgettable experience, which they do not have to enjoy through the lens of a camera. Full immersion within Kusama’s exhibit can reveal much more than its aesthetic beauty alone.
On the first day of ticket sales at the Broad, all 50,000 advanced tickets were sold in less than an hour, according to CBS. The museum then added an additional 40,000 tickets, which were sold out in about two hours. There are still opportunities to visit the exhibit since a limited number of tickets will be sold each day of the exhibit at the door for $30.00.
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