Yayoi Kusama has described experiencing visual hallucinations since childhood and coping with them by painting the patterns of dots she saw. She moved to New York in 1957 and in the 1960s made work that went beyond the canvas — the 'infinity nets' covering a surface, soft sculptures, and in 1965 her first mirror room, Phalli's Field. All six surfaces of a small space are mirrored, a pattern is placed inside, and the viewer entering becomes part of an image multiplied infinitely, themselves included.

The conceptual core is what Kusama calls self-obliteration: the individual becomes indistinguishable within the pattern. In the New York of the 1960s this was at once a personal means of coping and a stance connected to her anti-war performances. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 and has lived since 1977, by her own choice, in a psychiatric facility, working in a studio across the street.

The reach the Infinity Rooms gained in the 2010s also marks a shift in contemporary art's relation to its audience: exhibitions draw queues of hours, entry to the rooms is limited to minutes, and the experience is largely shared by being photographed. This is argued in two directions — as art reduced to a spectacle designed for social media, and as a contribution that widens the museum's audience and turns passive looking into bodily experience. The sixty-year consistency of Kusama's work is a reminder that the current popularity is a late recognition: she was making the same rooms in 1965, when almost nobody was interested.