ONDOKUZ MAYIS ÜNİVERSİTESİ

GÜZEL SANATLAR ENSTİTÜSÜ

SANAT VE TASARIM ANASANAT DALI
SANATTA YETERLİK PROGRAMI

Görsel Kültür ve Göstergebilim Dersi

Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Tarik Yazar

Hazırlayan
Marina Ersoy

Samsun, 2020.

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CONCEPTUAL ARTWORK ANALYSIS ACCORDING TO THE SEMIOTIC
ANALYSIS METHOD OF ALGIRDAS JULIEN GREIMAS:

Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away by Yayoi Kusama

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze an installation work by artist Yayoi Kusama called “Infinity
Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” according to the semiotic
analysis method of Algirdas Julien Greimas. Applying Greiman’s generative model the work is
analyzed as a whole by differentiating between its deep and surface structures presented in the
three levels of metalanguage. The model is used as a tool to better understand the thinking
process and the creation process of the author. In order to capture a message of the artwork,
Greimas’ productive process chart, the narrative program and the actantial model, analysis were
conducted. A brief history of artist’s life and art practice was observed in order to gain fuller and
more complete understanding of a work. Together, artist’s history and semiotic analysis of a
work in question bring the idea of the artwork and the realization process of that idea from the
blurriness of the esthetic experience into the light of clear vision.

Introduction

In this paper I will analyze installation work of artist Yayoi Kusama called “Infinity Mirrored
Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away”. The goal of this study is to analyze the
understanding of interpretation of an art installation and its correlations to the viewers and art
world. For analysis I will be using semiotic analysis methods of Algirdas Julien Greimas. He is
one of the most important semioticians and the founder of the Paris school of semiotics (Perron
and Collins 1989). Starting as a linguist specializing in semantics, he contributed to the
Continental semiotics founded by Saussure and was also influenced by such important
structuralists as Barthes, Levi-Straus, and Hjelmslev. For Greimas, semiotics is not the study of
discrete signs but rather of the continuous signification process: the articulation of meaning that
takes place in the two macro-semiotic systems of natural languages and the natural world. Thus,
Greimas’s theory is not restricted to the linguistic sphere. (Pikkarainen, 2017) We see that
Greimas' semiotic approach is inspired by the form / substance structure of L. Hjelmslev.
Greimas applied this method, which Hjelmslev applies to linguistic texts, to different (non-
linguistic) strings. In doing this, he has developed the analysis method consisting of meaning
levels. (Yazar, 2019) Gremas’s semiotics employs three levels of meta-language. The signifying
expression (the whole) is to be translated into a language of description which then must be
“interpreted” in methodological language forming the second level. Thirdly, methodology must

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be explicated in epistemological language. This structure offers a way to keep research under
conceptual control and normatively neutral. (Pikkarainen, 2017)
The generative model is a process–structure used to analyze a discourse as a whole by
differentiating between its deep and surface structures. The deepest level represents the
fundamental value structure analyzed with the semiotic square. At the semio-narrative level, the
Subject interacts with other actants, eliciting action motivated by the fundamental value
structure. This surface level is still abstract. All the concrete details, such as individual actors,
their features, and time and space relations, appear at the third discursive level. As a heuristic
device, Greimas’s model does not claim to be realistic; rather, it depicts metaphorically the
creation of meaning from an abstract idea to the concrete story or expression: from surface to
depth. (Pikkarainen, 2017)
It is for these reasons this kind of analysis is very favorable for the analysis of works of art,
because it also deals with the physical, formal characteristics of the work and the deeper abstract
and symbolic meanings that the work carries within itself. Thus, it gives the opportunity to see
comprehend a complete nature of the work composed from its formal and conceptual side. The
importance of neither aspect is not neglected, but on the contrary, emphasizing their symbiosis
provides a fuller understanding. Hopefully this analysis will provide us with understanding of
how production and materialization of an idea influence the presentation and understanding of
that idea, what their mutual relationship is, and to what extent the success of a artwork depends
on the balance between the material and the ideological realm of the work.

About artist

Before we start the analysis of the selected work I find it important to get familiar with the artist
trough the observation of her artistic carrier. Therefore the meaning of the work and the intention
of the artist come forward easier and clearer that they would if we didn’t know the artist herself.
In this specific case artist’s life and personality are of great importance to the understanding of
an artwork.
Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan. Kusama trained at the
Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts in a traditional Japanese painting. However she was inspired by
American Abstract impressionism. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became
interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her
paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo in the 1950s. By 1950, Kusama was depicting abstracted
natural forms in watercolor, gouache, and oil, primarily on paper. She began covering surfaces—
walls, floors, canvases with the polka dots that would become a trademark of her work. The vast
fields of polka dots, or "infinity nets", as she called them, were taken directly from her
hallucinations. (Taylor, 2012) After living in Tokyo and France, at the age of 27 Kusama left for
the United States. She has stated that she began to consider Japanese society "too small, too
servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women". (Priscilla, 2017) She moved to New York
City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially

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in the pop-art movement. (Pollok, 2006) During her time in the US, she quickly established her
reputation as a leader in the avant-garde movement and received praise for her work from the
anarchist art critic Herbert Read. (Yoshimoto, 2005) In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan in ill
health, where she began writing surrealistic novels, short stories, and poetry. In 1977 Kusama
checked herself into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she eventually took up
permanent residence. She has been living at the hospital since, by choice. Her studio, where she
has continued to produce work since the mid-1970s, is a short distance from the hospital
in Shinjuku, Tokyo. (McDonald, 2005) Kusama is often quoted as saying: "If it were not for art,
I would have killed myself a long time ago." 1 From this base, she has continued to produce
artworks in a variety of media, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several
novels, a poetry collection, and an autobiography. Her painting style shifted to high-colored
acrylics on canvas, on an amped-up scale. (Cotter, 2012) Her work is based in conceptual art and
shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract
expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She
works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, film,
fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important
living artists to come out of Japan. (Yamamura, 2015)

Origins of her work

Kusama started creating art at an early age. She experienced a harshly repressive childhood
through the depression and war years. (Bell, 2010) Her mother was not supportive of her creative
endeavors. Her mother was also apparently physically abusive, and Kusama remembers her
father as "the type who would play around, who would womanize a lot". (Nayeri, 2012)
The privations of these years, and the oppressive presence of a strictly disciplinary mother,
underpin the rapid escalation of acute anxieties into mental illness, manifest in obsessive
compulsive behaviors, hysteria, narcissism, hallucinations, and a morbid fear of sex. (Bell, 2010)
Her traumatic childhood, including her fantastic visions, can be said to be the origin of her
artistic style. (Dailey,2020) When she was ten years old, she began to experience
vivid hallucinations which she has described as "flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots".
(Priscilla, 2017) These hallucinations also included flowers that spoke to Kusama, and patterns
in fabric that she stared at coming to life, multiplying, and engulfing or expunging her, a process
which she has carried into her artistic career and which she calls "self-obliteration". Kusama's art
became her escape from her family and her own mind when she began to have hallucinations.
(Pound, 2020) The enveloping veils of dots and linear webs in the early drawings reproduce
hallucinations in which the dots and nets covered her and her surroundings. The dots and nets
separated her from the rest of the world at precisely the time that her de-personalized syndrome
was diagnosed. (Bell, 2010) Since childhood, Kusama has been afflicted with a hallucination-
inducing anxiety disorder associated with a condition called depersonalization, a “phenomenon

1
Art Review (interview), 2007

4
of experiencing a loss of personality.” This condition, combined with a tumultuous relationship
with her mother, drove Kusama to flee to New York in 1957, in desperate pursuit of creative
freedom and personal liberation. (Martin, 2017)

Chronology of her works

When Kusama arrived in New York several of her most significant series were begun in this
period, including her Infinity Net works and the Accumulation sculptures. Her breakthrough
came in October 1959 at the artist-run Brata Gallery, where she exhibited five large Infinity Net
paintings. (Zwirner, 2019) Here she continued to develop the early Infinity Net paintings through
a radical increase in scale, covering the entire painted canvas in interdependent and ambiguous
fields of dots floating above nets, and nets defining the spaces around the dots. (Bell, 2010) She
describes the immediate and direct appeal of engagement with the physical medium of paint on
the flat pictorial surface in a working method in which... the endlessly repetitive rhythm (of
brush strokes) and the monochromatic surface presents a new pictorial experiment with different
‘light’ which cannot be defined by regular pictorial construction and methods. (Yayoi as cited in
Bell, 2010) This obsessive fixation with the definition and engagement with the medium was
consistent with the preoccupations with qualities of medium, surface flatness and grid constructs
emerging within the broader New York school modernist context. Indeed, through this period
Yayoi was to exhibit alongside non-objective artists like Mark Rothko and Donald Judd. (Bell,
2010)

1. Yayoi Kusama with an Infinity Net painting in her New York studio, 1961.

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The Accumulation sculptures.

The development of the sculptural works

began in 1961, when Yayoi started making
stuffed fabric protrusions and covering
domestic objects and furniture with them. The
emergence of these works was not
coincidental. It was a logical development
from the implicitly tactile character of her
painted surfaces. Given the subtle but
insistent force with which Yayoi’s paintings
engage and involve the viewer, optically and
physically, the adoption of more three-
dimensional modes seems inevitable. These
works were exhibited alongside those of other
New York artists like Claes Oldenberg,
George Segal and Andy Warhol who also
drew on similar territories of domestic
objects, the recycled, or the banal. (Bell,
2010) The artist uses her complexes and fear
as subjects, the phallus or the industrially
2. Yayoi Kusama with 'Aggregation: One Thousand Boats
Show‘, Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York, 1963 produced food (macaroni). The theme of
sexual anxiety linked much of that work.
Many artists and art critics were impressed by her work including Andy. She showed alongside
Arman, Allan Kaprow and Marcel Duchamp, as well as pop artists Warhol, Oldenburg, Jim
Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann. (Zwirner, 2019) Later Yayoi
developed this covering mode into food works like the macaroni-covered mannequins, gluing on
macaroni pieces in the same obsessive-repetitive way as she used the polka dot. These covered
objects led to installations in interiors covered in phallic forms, filled with macaroni-covered
mannequins, and macaroni-covered floors in overwhelming amalgams of forms, colours, patterns
and sounds. Later works employed multiple lights, lights as dots, as stars, as shop decoration, as
fields and rows and patterns. These works form the background context for Yayoi’s experiments
in live performance, and integration of a performative component or her own presence into the
installation works. (Bell, 2010)

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Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field

Kusama starts to include electric

lights and mirrors in her installations.
Among numerous well-received
exhibitions is November’s ‘Floor
Show’ at Castellane Gallery, which
features her first Infinity Mirror
Room 1965. (Zwirner, 2019) In this
infinity room, perhaps the best known
of these works, the viewer (most
memorably a red-clad Yayoi herself)
stands, surrounded by the field of red
on white phallus forms rising out of
the floor, reflected horizontally
outwards in every direction in a
kaleidoscopic confusion of images of
self, edge and color. The clinical
whiteness and blood red of the phallic
3. Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (Floor Show) Castellane forms introduce an element of
Gallery, 1965, New York
discomfort in their suggestion of
medical or bandage-like associations.
(Bell, 2010)

At this time, Kusama also begins to stage her first happenings. In the 1960s, Kusama organized
outlandish happenings often involving nudity and designed to protest the Vietnam War. Between
1967 and 1969 she concentrated on performances held with the maximum publicity, usually
involving Kusama painting polka dots on her naked performers, as in the Grand Orgy to Awaken
the Dead at the MoMA 1969. (Pilling, 2012) In the early New York performance works first
Yayoi herself and subsequently whole groups of participants are drawn into intense group art
experiences, part painting and collage, part surreal party, part psychedelic orgy, in the most
physically and sensually intimate of artist-participant engagements. In a very real sense these
events, and the dark, edgy filmed recordings of them, realize the same almost complete – if
transient – experience of another world. (Bell, 2010) Throughout her career Yayoi has repeatedly
extended her practice to embrace performance and happening, video, poetry and song. (Bell,
2010)

Narcissus Garden installation

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In 1966, she participated in the Venice Biennale. Her Narcissus Garden comprised hundreds of
mirrored spheres outdoors in what she called a "kinetic carpet". Kusama, dressed in a golden
kimono, was selling each individual sphere, until she was stopped by Biennale
authorities. Narcissus Garden was as much about the promotion of the artist through the media
as it was an opportunity to offer a critique of the mechanization and commodification of the art
market. (Sullivan, 2015) Narcissus Garden crystallized the motifs of repetition and pattern,
reflection and light, and the invitation to the physical, optical and reflected participation of the
viewer. The viewer’s own presence is graphically evident everywhere in the myriad repetitions
of their own narcissistic reflections on every one of the shiny silver mirror balls. The work’s 800
mirror surfaced steel spheres3 are laid out – like a field of giant pachinko balls – in apparently
random clusters around the perimeter of the room. In every one of the mirror balls each viewer
finds their own reflection right at the center of the reflection of the entire work, audience and
space. Together with the opportunities the reflective medium provides for the exploration of
potentials of light, pattern, color or structure, the narcissist theme necessarily informs all of the
mirror works. (Bell, 2010)

When she left New York she was practically forgotten as an artist until the late 1980s and 1990s,
when a number of retrospectives revived international interest. Kusama returned to the
international art world with shows in New York City and Oxford, England. In 1993 she
represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. (Zwirner, 2019)

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 4. The Mirror Room (Pumpkin) – a polka dot-covered orange and black mirrored installation originally shown at the
Venice Biennale in 1993

Following the success of the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Kusama went on
to produce a huge, yellow pumpkin sculpture covered with an optical pattern of black spots. The
pumpkin came to represent for her a kind of alter-ego or self-portrait. (Chappo, 2017)
Between 1998 and 1999 a major retrospective of her works was shown at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Walker Art Center
in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2000, Kusama won
The Education Minister's Art Encouragement Prize and Foreign-Minister's Commendations.
Received the Asahi Prize in 2001, the Medal with Dark Navy Blue Ribbon in 2002, the French
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officier), and the Nagano Governor Prize (for the contribution in
encouragement of art and culture) in 2003. In 2006 she received the Japan Art
Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting.2 In 2009 she started working on a new
series of large canvases in bright colours, called “My Eternal Soul”, deciding to make 100. But
today Kusama is still working on the My Eternal Soul series having long since reached her initial
goal of 100 paintings: “I want to paint 1000 or 2000 paintings. I want to keep painting even after
I die.”(Tan, 2019)
2
Biography: Yayoi Kusama. (2013). Retrieved January 9, 2020, from http://yayoi-kusama.jp/e/biography/.

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Seen collectively, Yayoi’s works traverse a huge territory. Her project has encompassed a
diverse range of media in drawing and painting, theatrical New York happenings, photography
and moving image, sculptures, body works and installations. Despite its diversity, this body of
work is neither disparate nor incoherent. Her project is bound by continuities that run like
connective threads between her varied engagements. Most constant of course is the polka dot. Its
persistent presence is managed and moderated by Yayoi’s obsessional preoccupation with
carefully modulated monochrome surfaces or fields of pure colour – especially red, but also
intensely bright yellows and oranges. The preoccupation with medium and surface informs also
her obsessions with complementary relations, of surface and illusion, reflection and light, and of
recurrent tensional oppositions of order and chaos. (Bell, 2010)

Mirror/infinity rooms

Kusama’s success in recent years can be contributed to the Mirror/Infinity rooms which she has
continued to produce since 1963. Kusama began using mirrors to transcend the physical
limitations of her own practice and achieve the repetition that is crucial to her work. Using
mirrors, she transformed the intense repetition of her earlier paintings and works on paper into a
perceptual experience. Over the course of her career, the artist has produced more than twenty
distinct Infinity Mirror Rooms. In these complex infinity mirror rooms lined with mirrored glass
contain scores of neon-colored balls, hanging at various heights above the viewer. (Yoshitake,
2017) Mirrors placed around installations create tensions between expanded perceptions of space
and dense reflected surfaces of repeating shapes and colours that make walls of pattern that seem
to enclose, making claustrophobic interior spaces. (Bell, 2010) Standing inside on a small
platform, an observer sees light repeatedly reflected off the mirrored surfaces to create the
illusion of a never-ending space. Standing inside these works, the boundaries of the surrounding
room seem to dissolve. It is hard to find our bearings, and it feels like being in a world where
everything is floating. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that
immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.
(Yoshitake, 2017) Kusama’s use of mirrors in her Infinity Room installations proliferates ad
infinitum not only minute particles, but also the viewers themselves. In what lecturer Basia
Sliwinska refers to as “relational participatory spaces,” viewers’ own reflections of themselves
proliferate and evoke the experience of a community. Viewer presence and participation is, in
fact, essential to the rooms. Sliwinska writes that the “insertion of subjects into sculptural
environments and installations activates the political dimension of Kusama’s art.” Her Infinity
Rooms explore the politics of her own identity as a non-Western female, a minority, and a minor
artist, channeling her feelings of alienation and obliteration into intimate spaces that create
moments of singular reflection and opportunities for collective experience. (Martin, 2017)

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5. “Love Forever” 1996, Seattle Art Museum 6. “Chandelier of grief” 2016, Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Analysis of a work: Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away
2013.

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 7. Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away 2013, David Zwirner gallery in New York

Installation, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away is consisting of
a series of mirrors positioned in such a way as to create the illusion of infinity. The ‘infinity
room’ is experienced from a completely enclosed position right inside the small-scale structure
of the installation. Despite its tiny space the experience is not claustrophobic. The effect is one of
a playful disorientation in the confusion of endless vanishing points, subtle movements and the
gently shimmering surface of lights reflected in the water below. Despite the apparently
stabilising presence of the crisp, grid-like edges of the myriad reflections, the experience is
disconcerting, even other-worldly – in the words of the supporting literature ‘our earth is like a
little polka dot among millions of other celestial bodies’. Even a short time inside this space
provokes a dazzling and intense experience generating sensual overload or saturation. (Bell,
2010)

1. Analysis at Descriptive Level

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Dimesions of a work: 287.7 × 415.3 × 415.3 cm

Material used for this work: Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED
lighting system, acrylic balls, and water.

Mirror Room consists of a dark chamber-like space completely lined in mirrors. This darkened

space is dimly illuminated with tiny luminous points of hundreds of small LED lights in red,
yellow and blue suspended in the air around the viewer. LED lights are flickering in a rhythmic
pattern creating pulsing electronic polka dots. As the multitudes of lights reflect, they accumulate
and expand exponentially. The infinity mirrors conjure endlessly repeating sequences of
reflections receding infinitely in every direction, creating the illusion of endless space. There is
a standing platform in the middle of the room slightly leveled above the floor. a shallow black
pool of water is stretching right across the floor below. Visitor is standing in the middle and there
are numerous reflections of his figure. Only one visitor at a time can experience the installation
activating the environment with his or her body once he/she is in the room.

After the Analysis at Descriptive Level i divided the installation into the 5 sections:

1. Section: Mirrors 4. Section Water on the floor

2. Section: Light bulbs 5. Section: Viewer

3. Section: Standing platform

1. Section: Mirrors

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A series of mirrors are positioned in such a way as to create the illusion of infinite space. They
completely cover the room’s floor and ceiling.

The chaos of the apparently random arrangement of lights and reflections is moderated by the
complex grid like web of the sharp edges of the mirror planes. (Bell, 2010)

2. Section: Light bulbs

Multi-colored LED bulbs are

suspended from the ceiling at
varying lengths that reflect off of
the mirrored walls and shallow
pool on the floor. As the multitude
of lights reflect, they accumulate
and expand exponentially in a
strobe light pattern that repeats
itself every 45 seconds in order to
create an illusory cosmos.

3. Section: Standing platform

Platform is positioned in the

middle of the room in order to
allow visitor a space to navigate
without disturbing the installation,

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especially the water in the floor pool. It resembles the beach docks and appears to be floating in
the empty space.

4. Section: Water on the floor

Water is almost unnoticeable and

unrecognizable in the low light of
the bulbs. But with movement of
the visitor that creates tremor of the
surface the reflecting lights are
gaining deeper and more realistic
reflection.

5. Section: The Viewer

Since the installation of light is

triggered by the entering of the viewer
he or she plays important part of the
work. With the figure endlessly

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multiplied in the mirrors the sensation of infinity and obliteration is created. The viewer is given
somewhat active role.

Person / Hero: Artist and mirrors are heroes in this work. Without them creating the millions
reflections and illusion of endless space the work would not be all-consuming and prophetic
enabling the author’s idea of spatial representation of her inner world to be transferred to the
audience.

Space: Carefully constructed small room inside of the gallery space.

Time: When we look at the work it does not give us any information about the time.

Indicators (Göstergeler) Straight meaning Side meaning

Mirrors A surface, typically of glass Symbol of wisdom and

coated with a metal amalgam,
which reflects a clear image.
Light bulbs A glass bulb which provides
light by passing an electric
current through a filament or a
pocket of inert gas.
awareness, truth, infinity,
other dimension
Light, pureness, energy,
souls

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 Standing platform A flat raised structure or area, safe place, a base, starting
usually one which something point
can stand on.

Water on the floor A small area of still water in Fluid, adaptive, moving,
a hollow place or container. reflective

Viewer A person who looks at or Initiator, capacitor, channel

inspects something.

2. Analysis at Narrative Level

This particular mirrored room is exhibited alongside with other 20 distinctive Kusama’s rooms in
numerous different galleries, and countries. The reflective surfaces allowed her vision to
transcend the physical limitations of her own productivity. Furthermore, the mirrors created a
participatory experience by casting the visitor as the subject of the work Kusama’s kaleidoscopic
environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. The rooms also provide
an opportunity to examine the artist’s central themes, such as the celebration of life and its
aftermath.

“Kusama’s art engages us in immediate, bodily, sensory experiences, allowing us to escape from
and return to self-consciousness. . . . Her work is cathartic and concrete, universal and specific,
infinitely appealing and intimately personal.” — Gayle Clemans reviewing Kusama in The
Seattle Times.

1. Communication Axis (Sender, Object, Receiver)

(Artist, Mirror room, Audiences)

In Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, as with the rest of her
Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama’s use of mirrors and pools of water confronts the viewer with
their own immediate reflection, which is at once innately familiar and yet strangely unreal,
mystically separate from the viewer themselves—here the reflection becomes the Other. The
infiniteness of viewers’ reflections in the mirrored walls, ceiling, and floor call to mind a sense
of displacement and otherworldliness, expressing Kusama’s experiences as an outsider in the
Western world.
With this allowance of people into her world and the manner in which she has clothed herself in
the polka dot, thus disappearing into it, Kusama comports herself as perpetually indomitable,

17
eluding desire and defying objectification. In revealing herself completely, she vanishes. (Martin,
2017)
Mirror room potential to draw the viewer in, optically, sensually, and physically, and the promise
this offers of the most intimate of engagements with the artist’s mind is always tempered by the
constraining or protective forces of the fields of dots, the mirror grids and even the lights and
stars. Together they conspire to devise the same distance between artist and viewer as they do to
mediate the artist’s relation with the viewer’s own world. (Bell, 2010)

B. Request Axis (Subject, Object)

(Artist, Mirror room)

The shininess of mirrors and mirroring metal surfaces, mirror balls, or metallic paint are used to
create multiple repetitions of shapes, forms, colours, patterns. Mirrors placed around installations
create tensions between expanded perceptions of space and dense reflected surfaces of repeating
shapes and colours that make walls of pattern that seem to enclose, making claustrophobic
interior spaces. (Bell, 2010)
By constructing her work around the polka dot as a way of both fixating on and overcoming
these hallucinations, Kusama continues to examine the endless possibilities that stretch between
the infinite and the infinitesimally small, along the way inviting viewers to become the minutiae
she proliferates. Her Infinity Rooms explore the politics of her own identity as a non-Western
female, a minority, and a minor artist, channeling her feelings of alienation and obliteration into
intimate spaces that create moments of singular reflection and opportunities for collective
experience. (Martin, 2017)
Within the rich psycho-sensual experiences Yayoi’s works provoke lies the deepest tensional
dichotomy. The works themselves perform the function of medium between artist and viewer. In
her art, uncontainable repetitions in behaviour and in drawings developed into a therapeutic
experience of endlessly repeating simple mechanical processes in what she thought of as a ‘self-
therapy’ for her obsessional neurosis: ‘painting pictures has become a therapy for me to
overcome the illness’. Repetition or obsessively repeated actions became a means to isolate
herself from the world. (Bell, 2010)

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 Greimas' Actors Model (Greimas’ın Eyleyenler Modeli)

Sender Object Receiver

Contemporary art, Mirrored room Audience
Artist

Supporting Subject Blocking

Contemporary art, Audience, Lack of knowledge
Mortality, Infinity Artist about artist’s history
Traditional art

3. Analysis at Spectral Level

These mirror-layered enclosed spaces give

the viewer an impression of entering a
boundless realm with all the surfaces
reflecting off one another, back and
forth, forever. “When the people see their
own reflection multiplied to infinity,” the
artist has said, “they then sense that there is
no limit to man’s ability to project himself
into endless space.” The quiet, meditative
space is a reflection on life and the
inevitability of death- subjects that have

8. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of

Millions of Light Years Away: Photo by Hope Dickens 19
fascinated Kusama since she was a child. She explains that her work "does battle at the boundary
between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die." By
encouraging visitors to contemplate their existence Kusama's ethereal work emphasizes the
interconnectedness we have to each other and the universe. "By using light, their reflection, and
so on, I wanted to show the cosmic image beyond the world where we live." Now in her ninth
decade and accepting of her own mortality, the work represents more harmonious aspirations by
the artist for inner and outer peace, and is seen as a progression from her early work, which
sought to fight and disrupt rather than reconcile. (Bianpoen, 2017)

Basic Contrasts

Lightness Darkness Lightness of the LED bulbs

comes in contrast of the dark
room.
Life Death As artist stated limitless and
endless space present birth and
death at the same time
Old New Artist presents her old ideas in
a new medium.

Singularity Plurality Singular viewer is opposed to

numerous number of light
bulbs and reflections.
Temporary Eternal In a short time period of 45
seconds one insipience eternity.

Boundaries Limitlessness In a very small and limited

space one can observe infinity
in space.

Conclusion

The retrospective of artist’s carrier and art practice enabled us to understand how artist thought
and style evolved. It made us understand that this latest work represents perfected way of
expressing the idea of timelessness, disembodiment, and selflessness that artist wanted to express
throughout her life. We understand that through her artistic practice and the creation of numerous
works, the artist has succeeded in creating the perfect form, medium and technique that
completes and complements the idea she wants to communicate to the audience. Her artistic life
is an evolutionary path, fulfilled with transformations and metamorphoses of an idea. And the

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analysis of this work gives us an insight into the connections Kusama has created between the
idea and the emotion and its materialization in the visual expression of the artist. You can see the
perfect balance between form, expression and idea created by years of experience. Therefore,
this work has an incredible impact on the viewer and his emotional response to the work,
because without error and vagueness she communicates the desired message very clearly and
precisely to the audience. This analysis allowed us to understand how Kusama achieved this
perfect relationship between the material, descriptive level and the subliminal, conceptual level
of her work.

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