Dots Obsession—Aspiring to Heaven’s Love presents artist Yayoi Kusama’s signature polka dots and reflective mirrors. Large balloons covered with white polka dots are suspended from the ceiling. Going deeper into the space, visitors will encounter a mirrored cubic environment that brings a kaleidoscopic experience. The work is a renewed manifestation of Kusama’s signature mirrored spaces and happenings from the 1960s. It provides a new dimension for understanding of the artist’s core concept of infinity and accumulation. The perceptual experience brought by the repetition of dots and the illusion of infinite space obliterates one into the cosmos.

Dots Obsession—Aspiring to Heaven’s Love (2022) was one of the three brand-new works by the artist presented in M+’s Special Exhibition Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, the largest retrospective of Kusama in Asia outside Japan.

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Japan) is one of the most important and influential Asian artists in the history of contemporary art. She is renowned for her prolific and ground-breaking practice, spanning paintings, sculptures, performances, moving images, and large-scale installations. Trained in traditional Japanese painting, she moved to the United States in 1957 and soon established herself in the American and European avant-garde for her unique and radical artistic language. She returned to Japan in 1973 and has relentlessly reinvented and created art that resonates with the time in which she lives.