In 2016, a day before she was to enrol as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sunaina Rajan made a pit stop in Los Angeles for a single day. Word had gone round that one of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms was on view at The Broad, the museum that had opened downtown the year before. She joined the line, and waited in it for seven hours till it was her turn to enter the room, albeit for under a minute, strictly timed by a staff member standing outside, who’d briskly open the door once the seconds ran out. “You really get just a very short glimpse of it,” recalls Rajan, who opened Gallery Maxima in Mumbai’s Fort district earlier this year. “But the physical experience is so unforgettable from the moment you enter, the way you experience it…you’re immersed in it completely.”
The legendary Japanese contemporary artist passed away earlier this month on 14 August at a hospital in Tokyo, aged 97. Her studio and her gallery, David Zwirner, announced her death on 26 August. The cause was multiple organ failure. Few artists have altered the physical act of looking at art as completely as she did, and she got there first, in 1965, with Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field, where hundreds of hand-sewn phallic forms, spotted in red, carpeted the floor of a mirrored room that repeated them into the horizon. “Traditionally, museum-going has been about standing in front of one masterpiece and really taking it in,” Rajan shares. “She inverts that completely. Instead of stepping into the museum to see a work, you’re now stepping into the work.”
When Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors opened at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, in 2017, it drew nearly 160,000 people, and the museum recorded its highest spring attendance since opening in 1974. The show went on to Seattle, back to The Broad, then to Toronto, Cleveland and Atlanta. In 2023 her work arrived in India for the first time as an Infinity Mirrored Room at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai, now part of its permanent collection.
Two years ago, Rajan made a longer pilgrimage to Naoshima, the island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea given over almost entirely to contemporary art. “You need three modes of transportation to get there – first by bus, then train, then ferry; and you can walk the whole island in under an hour,” describes Rajan, At the end of a pier sits her yellow Pumpkin, which was installed there in 1994, swept into the sea by a typhoon in August 2021, and remade and returned to the same spot on 4 October 2022. What struck Rajan was that the reverence held there too, with nobody enforcing it. “In contrast, there’s no one attending to it, no security timing you. There’s just this sort of decorum around her work, because there’s so much respect for it.” Elsewhere on the island, Kusama’s mirrored spheres sit in a body of water, near buildings by Tadao Ando. “What’s fascinating to see is how the architecture, the art and nature interact with each other,” Rajan points out.