Top 10 Instagram hotspots at the NGV’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition
Hey, Instagrammer. Don’t know which pumpkins or polka dots to spam everyone’s news feeds with? We got you. Here’s our list of the must-do moments at the NGV’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition.
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She is the preferred artist of the Instagram generation.
Yayoi Kusama has been hashtagged millions of times, and A-listers Adele and Katy Perry rushed to take a selfie when one of her famous infinity rooms launched at a London art gallery.
“Her art is liked by many people … across all borders, genders and ages,” Professor Akira Tatehata, director of the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, told the Herald Sun.
“She has created abstract work her whole life, but leans towards neo-pop works and objects the younger generation are more familiar with. Perfect for Instagram, right?” he added, laughing. “Even on phone screens, you can feel the charm and energy and colours.”
With the biggest-ever exhibition of Kusama works — 200 pieces and 10 infinity rooms — opening at Melbourne’s NGV this weekend, Instagrammers are poised to jam everybody’s feeds with vibrant Yayoi joy.
Wayne Crothers, a senior curator at the NGV, said Kusama was always ready for her Insta-moment.
“It’s something she’s always promoted and aspired to,” Crothers said. “You go back to her time in New York in the 1960s as an artist and activist. She was an expert at drawing media attention to herself. She understood the power of social media before it existed.”
Here are our top 10 picks for Instagram-worthy snaps at the NGV’s summer blockbuster exhibition, Yayoi Kusama.
My Heart Is Filled To The Brim With Sparkling Light (2024)
A world exclusive from Kusama with love to Melbourne. This infinity mirror room invites visitors into a spectacular space that opens into a seemingly infinite celestial universe. This room has had “global attention,” NGV director Tony Ellwood said, adding: “It’s worth every bit.”
The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019)
An immersive installation featuring six-metre-tall polka-dot tendrils. As visitors move through the space, the towering yellow-and-black tentacular forms appear to writhe and intersect overhead.
Dots Obsession (1996/2024)
A walk-through room featuring biomorphic inflatables. Dots Obsession uses mirrored walls to extend Kusama’s fascination with dots, which, for her, symbolise both the individual and, when presented in great numbers, the cosmos.
Love is Calling (2013)
A technicolor infinity room wonderland. This work welcomes visitors into a space filled with multi coloured luminous, tentacle-like forms protruding from the floor and ceiling.
The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens (2017)
This yellow and black polka-dotted room invites visitors to look through a small opening to see an infinite kaleidoscopic landscape of glowing pumpkins.
Tender Are The Stairs To Heaven (2004)
A ladder, with colour-changing LED lights, stretching to infinity, and presumably to heaven above, and the great unknown below. Which way to go? Decisions, decisions.
With All My Love For The Tulips, I Pray Forever (2019)
Multi-coloured polka dots in an immersive installation with oversized flowers. The effect is like a garden of woozy delights.
Narcissus Garden, (1966/2024)
A public work situated in the foyer of the NGV. This installation features 1400 stainless silver balls presented en masse. As the metallic spheres reflect one another, they create an infinitely recurring landscape.
Dancing Pumpkin (2020)
Gourdness gracious. Another public work to be enjoyed for free in the NGV foyer. Kusama’s obsession with pumpkins dates back to her childhood and a lifelong battle with mental illness. To her, the vegetables symbolise comfort and solace.
The Obliteration Room (2002)
Come on, kid-fluencers! This installation, in the NGV’s free children’s gallery, as part of Kusama For Kids, invites participants to add a sticker to the hundreds and thousands that will eventually cover all white surfaces, “obliterating” it with coloured dots.
NGV director, Tony Ellwood, said: ‘There are few artists working today with the global presence of Yayoi Kusama. This world premiere exhibition allows local audiences and visitors the chance to experience Kusama’s practice in deeper and more profound ways than ever before.”
Creative Industries Minister Colin Brooks added: “Crowds (will be) awe-struck by Kusama’s work. Securing this exhibition is yet another example of why the NGV is Australia’s most popular gallery and Melbourne is Australia’s cultural capital.”
Yayoi Kusama runs at the NGV from December 15 to April 21.
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