Phalluses, dots and songs about antidepressants: A true blockbuster has landed at NGV

The work of Yayoi Kusama is unmissable. Giant pumpkins with playful tendrils. Polka dots endlessly proliferating across inflatables, flowers, walls and ceilings. Infinity rooms where you can watch yourself endlessly multiply amid dazzling lights. Phalluses sprouting everywhere.

The avant-garde Japanese artist, now 95 and a beloved celebrity, is exhibiting at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) with 180 works. Walking among universes of mirrors, dots and contrasting colours – through art about infinity and fertility – the show was made for Instagram. Indeed, I’ve never incidentally photographed myself so much in a gallery just from all the reflective surfaces.

The first glimpse of ‘Infinity Mirror Room – My Heart is Filled to the Brim with Sparkling Light’ (2024) by Yayoi Kusama at NGV.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Yet Kusama’s digital-friendly art, which often centres the viewer, was being honed long before exhibitions were shaped to deliver shareable experiences. For an artist equally genuine and strategically ambitious, who documents herself posing with her art, in Kusama’s world selfies and photographs – acts of seeing and being seen – feel like the most authentic reaction possible.

Across two parts, the show charts Kusama’s career, beginning with the less flashy but still riveting early works from the 1950s. There are moody paintings amid one small treasure: a piece from 1952 titled Infinity Dots. With black dots on beige, it’s the quaint opening to a life-long obsession. It’s also joyful to see the ’50s and ’60s paintings, Infinity Nets, which Kusama first became known for — minimalist, quietly cosmic, loops and dots repeated across canvases.

Nearby are the hilarious, still somehow outrageous, 1960s phallic-laden sculptures, where cushy, pillow-like phalluses and balls, painted silver, stem from every direction on furniture and clothing. The comic repetition of the male genitals covering all surfaces renders them impotent and powerless.

Walking through rooms of photographs, polka-dot-covered inflatables and moving image works – with one darkly funny video where Kusama sings about antidepressants – the exhibition leads to a realm of magnificent, large-scale paintings stacked to the ceiling, pulsating with dots, lines and colours.

‘Ceremony for Suicide’ (1975) by Yayoi Kusama, on display at NGV.Credit: Chris Hopkins

And throughout the show are fragments of Narcissus Garden, a replay of Kusama’s 1966 Venice Biennale installation of hundreds of silver reflective balls (which she famously tried to sell to passers-by, a joke about making macho male art and commercialising her “balls”).

Yet what people around the world line up for is the Infinity Mirrored Room. With two rooms at NGV – one of them a world premiere – viewers stand inside a space lined with mirrors and coloured lights, which expand cosmically in every direction, as far as the eye can see.

Her desire to crowd a space with dots and colour, to overwhelm with stimuli and repetition, is to eventually reach a kind of formlessness. For Kusama, a sense of obliteration is the moment at which one feels most alive and part of the world. With the self at the centre, it is spiritualism for the 21st century.

Yayoi Kusama at Bust Out Happening 1969, Sheep Meadow in Central Park, New York.Credit: Yayoi Kusama

Born in 1929 in rural Japan to a wealthy family, Kusama had a traumatic childhood set against World War II. She has spoken of being punished by her mother for her father’s adultery and feeling suffocated by a conservative family and society.

She fled to New York in 1957, becoming an experimental artist, painting about the cosmos and fertility in a male-dominated scene. She flouted conventions, creating theatrical art events and orgy-like performances with people covered in dots (of which there is documentation at NGV). She voluntarily committed herself to a mental health hospital in Japan in 1977 and has willingly lived there since.

As a child she had hallucinations of polka dots covering the world; of sunflowers that spoke to her; of feeling like she was fragmenting. Pumpkins became a form of solace. Meanwhile, an obsessive replication of sex and fertility infiltrates Yayoi Kusama through dots, phalluses, sperm-like shapes, tendrils, flowers. Kusama is obsessed with sex, but she also dislikes and fears it. Her neuroses are made into art for the purpose of not being destroyed by them.

For all the primal happiness of Kusama’s work, one can feel this melancholy underneath. Her art is like a pop song or children’s book: happy on the surface, but once you’ve grown up and understand suffering, you know that ecstatic worlds can belie sombre truths. Kusama is perhaps creating the joy she couldn’t find elsewhere – and it’s infectious.

Usually, shows billed as blockbusters often aren’t blockbusters at all – instead shouting famous names to shield second-rate works and dubious themes. Yayoi Kusama is a proper blockbuster.

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

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