Counting Dots
“Counting the polka dots,” supermodel Natalia Vodianova, who attended the opening, wrote in her Instagram post as she posed at the Kusama installation. “Are you up to the challenge?” More than 17,000 Instagram users liked the post.
Kusama’s Garage exhibition includes two immersive installations. In “Infinity Mirrored Room -– The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” each viewer enters a darkened room alone and is surrounded by the mesmerizing universe of blinking lights.
The second piece, the 2015 “Guidepost to the Eternal Space” is a brightly lit environment, with white polka dots on a red background that covers walls and various structures.
Crowd Pleaser
Kusama has made different versions of the infinity room and was an instant crowd pleaser whenever it’s been shown.
In 2012, another infinity room with a different title was a popular feature of the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” was first shown at the Zwirner gallery in Manhattan in 2013, drawing 75,000 people who lined up for hours in the freezing weather.
Kusama’s latest exhibition at Zwirner, “Give Me Love,” runs through June 13. So far it has attracted 30,000 visitors, according to the gallery. The show includes new psychedelic paintings and a stand-alone one-room house called “the obliteration room.”
The gallery’s website warns that the wait time can be two hours. Visitors place multi-colored stickers on surfaces and objects, eventually covering up, or obliterating, the original white space.
On Instagram there are more than 168,000 posts with hashtag #YayoiKusama, surpassing 136,719 posts with a hashtag of #JeffKoons. Pablo Picasso’s hashtag has 576,582 posts and #Beyonce has 6.6 million posts.