Going to see Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms doesn’t feel like going to an art exhibition, it feels like stepping into a fairground, or another world.

If you are not familiar with her work, she is a Japanese artist born in 1929, whose work range from sculpture to installation, performance and many other media. While often whimsical in appearance (from her signature polka dots to fairy tales pumpkins and her bright outfits and wigs ), her work covers themes ranging from mental health issues (she has been living in a mental health hospital since the 70s, working from a nearby studio) to sexuality, feminism and the role of women in society.

The Tate show was supposed to open a year ago but was delayed due to COVID. I had been looking forward to seeing it last year so was waiting with trepidation for the tickets to be released this year, and was very glad to be able to snap up a couple for an early morning slot on a sunny bank holiday Monday.

The exhibition was pretty quiet at that time, which meant we were able to go back and forth as we pleased, and to see the infinity rooms several times. The shows starts with a mirror box titled “The Universe as see from the stairway to heaven”, into which the audience peers to see kaleidoscope of colourful spheres, and includes a range of photos covering her work and career, as well as the two infinity rooms.

The first room, titled “Chandelier of Grief” is the smallest, an octagon covered in mirror, with a large chandelier behind glass panels in the centre of the space. Because of the mirrors, it looks like there are not one but thousands of chandeliers spinning around the room. Everywhere you look, up above or downwards, there are more chandeliers floating around, blue and white light blurring into each other. It creates the impression of a much bigger room, a  quiet ballroom you can waltz around under the flickering lights of a thousand electric candles.

The second room, “Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled With The Brilliance of Life” was the most impressive. A larger and squarer space, it features a small walkways snaking a path between low pools of water. Small colourful lightbulbs dangle from the ceiling everywhere at different heights, their colours turning from blue to green to red to multi colours, and occasionally, falling into complete darkness. The walls are covered with mirrors again, so that the lights reflect in the mirrors behind them as well as the water below, so that the whole space is a dazzling, dizzying world of lights. It is hard to see where the ground is, there are lights all around you, above you, below you and everywhere, so that it feels almost like floating in space, an astronaut lost in a constellation of multicoloured stars. It is mesmerising, disorientating, hypnotic.

It is so disorientating, that at one point I did lose my balance, and ended up a foot in the water; a sudden, brutal reminder that gravity was not in fact suspended, and that I was not navigating my way through a field of asteroids but through a small room in a museum. 

One of the roles of art, people say, is to transport the viewer to another place. Yayoi Kusama, who talks about obliterating herself in her art, creates works so immersive that the audience can completely lose themselves into them, enjoying both life and grief in such an overwhelming way that time and space become irrelevant, a trance-like state where we are not completely in the world, but not completely elsewhere either.