REVIEW: [Yayoi Kusama Retrospective] @ Tate Modern, London

Tate Modern recently revealed its new retrospective for the renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

"Her art has an almost hallucinatory intensity that reflects her unique vision of the world, whether through a teeming accumulation of detail or the dense patterns of polka dots that have become her signature. The incessant quality of this gesture is both obsessive and meditative.

In the late 1990s, Kusama returned to making room size installations. In her installations, this image of bourgeois stasis is turned into something surreal and uncanny. All the room and furnishing covered with sticker spots which glow. The polka dot can be the visual shorthand signifying her hallucinatory visions. Covering in a room in psychedelic polka dots might be her attempt to visualise and restage the experience of her own hallucinatory episodes, during which she senses the physical world overtaken by endlessly repeated forms. Her representation of her inner world results in an installation that is fantastical and potentially unsettling. Spots are more readily experienced as interruptions of our own field of vision rather than a surface motif.

I'm Here But Nothing (2000) by Yayoi Kusama

I'm Here But Nothing (2000) by Yayoi Kusama

Her piece 'Infinity Mirror Room' is a depiction of infinite space. Reflecting surfaces has become a recurring element in her work. Large scale environments that viewers can walk into and explore. She proposes an experience for the infinite, inviting the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self -accompanying Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration." -Tate Modern

Infinity Mirror Room (2012) by Yayoi Kusama

Kusama's work is truly mesmerising, it leads the viewer into her work and manages to fixate their imagination and attention. Her play with dots really does affect the viewer's field of vision and navigation of planes. I found that her glow in the dark dots made it hard to pick out the foreground from the background because all the dots were springing out at me, making it very hard to focus on anything in particular.

In her 'Infinity Mirror Room' installation, what Kusama creates is not only aesthetically beautiful but really quite jarring. You see the outside of the space, the cube in which the installation resides, and yet when you enter your eyes deceive you into thinking there are no boundaries. It literally felt like I was suspended, floating in time and space, with no grounding of where one space ended and the other began. It was a lovely way to get lost in your surroundings, and I was well aware that I could have easily stayed there for much longer. The lights flash in a cycle no longer than a couple of minutes before they start again, and yet that repetition doesn't become mundane, the curiosity and engagement is still there long after you realise how it works. It is a very simple method of trickery, and yet its delights are endless.

Mirror Room (Pumpkin) 1991 by Yayoi Kusama

Obliteration Room (2011) by Yayoi Kusama

Above is Kusama's 'Obliteration Room' (2011), a real collaboration of artist and viewer as she invites children and visitors to cover a blank white room in a plethora of coloured polka dots.

Walking in My Mind (2009) by Hayward Publishing

I bought a book by Hayward Publishing called "Walking in My Mind", which explores the ways in which the creative mind processes and pictures information. It features other installation artists as well as Yayoi Kusama, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Chiharu Shiota, Jason Rhoades and Pipilotti Rist. It also features an essay on the mind in relation to the brain and consciousness. I was ecstatic at this book discovery, it covers many of the artists I have studied whilst also interrogating the subject of psychology, mind and consciousness.