50 Years New in Asia: The Endless Universe of Yayoi Kusama
"For more than forty years, Kusama has continued to produce variations on the mirror room, which so succinctly yet extravagantly embodies her stated aim to obliterate the self by infinite multiplication… Importantly, the ‘empty’ mirror rooms allow viewers a visual approximation of infinite space in real t.mes . The most recent versions, which use LED technology, are blatantly poetic, replete with cosmological allusions…"
1966年草間彌生在紐約卡斯特蘭尼畫廊舉行「偷窺秀／永恆的愛」展覽現場
I n her Mirror Rooms from the mid-1960s onwards, Yayoi Kusama is able to achieve all-encompassing repetitions that are, for the first t.mes , truly infinite. My Heart is Flying to the Universe (2018) is a magnificent, sophisticated example of Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, referencing her seminal early mirror installation in Peep Show or Endless Love Show in 1966. My Heart is Flying to the Universe is the first Mirror Room of this scale to be offered at auction in Asia and marks the second t.mes that a Mirror Room of this size has ever come to auction, making it an incredibly rare, exciting work by the artist to be offered in Hong Kong. Towering over two metres in height, the present work allows viewers to peer into infinity and lose themselves in the vastness of the universe that Kusama creates using lights and mirrors. My Heart is Flying to the Universe visually immerses the viewer in a galaxy of shimmering LED lights that twinkle in a rhythmic pattern, creating a phenomenological experience that inspires a sense of boundlessness.
“These are introspective spaces for perceiving, listening and feeling.”
1965年草間彌生在紐約卡斯特蘭尼畫廊舉行個展「Floor Show」，並於《無限鏡屋—陽具原野》內留影
Kusama’s Mirror Rooms represent a breakthrough in the artist’s search for infinite repetition, using mirrors to achieve the repetition that until that point had been realised through the labour-intensive manual process of painting nets and the sewing and stuffing of her soft sculpture. It was in 1965 that Kusama used mirrors to create her first mirror room, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, which was installed in the exhibition, Floor Show, held at Castellane Gallery in New York that year. In Phalli’s Field, Kusama covered the floor of a 25 square-metre mirrored room with hundreds of her signature soft sculptural protuberances, which themselves were painted in a myriad of dancing red dots. Viewers were able to step into the room, activating themselves within the space among the seemingly endless fields of jutting sculptural protrusions.
1966年草間彌生攝於「偷窺秀／永恆的愛」展場
Hal Reiff攝
The following year, Kusama exhibited the second iteration of her widely-celebrated Mirror Rooms, titled Peep Show or Endless Love Show. This t.mes , Kusama emptied the room of any physical sculptural forms and positioned the viewer outside of the space, encouraging them to peer into the hexagonal box through small windows. In Peep Show or Endless Love Show, Kusama created an environment of mirrors and flashing lights of blue, green, red and yellow. Journalist and critic Arthur Lubow has commented upon the visual experience of these inaugural mirror boxes as reflections of Kusama’s urban experience, living in New York in the 1960s: “it was akin to the experience of living in a huge city such as New York, where the view at night from a skyscraper like the Empire State Building consists of twinkling points of illumination, and on the street, the stream of faces in the crowd sweeps away one’s individual self-consciousness” (Arthur Lubow, ‘Prologue’ in Louise Neri and Takaya Goto, Eds., Yayoi Kusama, New York 2012, p. 29). Both Phalli’s Field and Peep Show or Endless Love Show of the mid-1960s served as models on which all future mirror rooms and boxes were based, with the present work, My Heart is Flying to the Universe (2018) unequivocally reminiscent of the latter hexagonal mirrored box first exhibited in 1966.
“While repetition had to be achieved manually in painting (painting nets) and sculpture (sewing and stuffing protrusions), repetition created by combined mirrors was a simple matter of a law of optics. Her painting and sculpture were physically constrained: even when they were made into Environments, the “infinity” realised therein was nothing but conceptual. However, by using the combined mirrors, purely visual images could be multiplied endlessly before our eye. The implication was enormous.”
Since 2014, more than 11 prominent institutions from around the world have acquired Infinity Mirror Rooms, test.mes
nt to the huge impact of these works on audiences across the globe. Today, examples of these works on a large-scale can be found in The Broad, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; the Rubell Museum, Miami; and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, amongst others. Like the Mirror Rooms found in these international museums, My Heart is Flying to the Universe offers viewers the chance to escape from the everyday and transport themselves into the vast, wondrous universe of Yayoi Kusama.
「在過去的四十多年間，草間一直創作不同版本的鏡屋，以一種華麗而精簡的方式，實現她透過無限乘法抹去自我的目的。鏡房『空無一物』，為觀眾帶來一種無限空間的實時視覺觀感，成為這作品的重要元素。她近期運用LED技術的版本，散發出赤裸裸的詩意，滿載著宇宙間的暗語...」
草間彌生自1960年代中起創作的鏡房，營造出一個個包羅萬象的重複世界，而且首次真正在臻至「無限」之境。在草間多個標誌性的無限鏡屋作品中，《My Heart is Flying to the Universe》（2018年）無疑是箇中無與倫比的巔峰之作，帶有她早期重要的鏡子裝置作品——1966年《偷窺秀／永恆的愛》的影子。《My Heart is Flying to the Universe》是首個在亞洲拍賣的鏡屋作品，亦是史上第二次有如此巨型的鏡屋登上拍場，絕對是香港少見的稀有珍品。這裝置作品高達兩米，觀眾可在草間運用光影和鏡面創造的無垠宇宙中徹底忘卻自我，一窺無限的面貌。作品中舖天蓋地的LED燈，隨著節拍閃閃發光，打造出一種無邊無際的現象學體驗，令人沉醉。
「這些是感知、聆聽和感受的內省空間。」
鏡屋無疑是草間彌生藝術生涯上的突破，象徵了她一直以來對無休止重複的追求——在鏡子出現之前，她一直以極度耗費時間和手工的網狀畫、縫紉，以及軟雕塑作為實現重複的媒介。草間首次利用鏡子打造鏡屋，是在1965年的《無限鏡屋——陽具原野》。這裝置作品於紐約卡斯特蘭尼畫廊「Floor Show」展覽展出，草間在25平方米的房間地面竪立多面鏡子，並覆上數以百計塗滿躍動紅點的突起物軟雕塑。進入房間的觀眾置身於無邊無際的突出物軟雕塑中，從而激活自我感官和意識。
「畫作和雕塑的重複性必需以人手方式呈現——即網狀畫，以及縫紉和軟雕塑填充物。以鏡子組合呈現的重複效果，則純粹是光學定律的結果。她的畫作和雕塑均有著物理限制，即使作品與環境結合，亦只能夠做到概念上的『無限』。然而，透過一連串的鏡子，純視覺畫面如今在大家眼前無限地複製折射——這背後有著非凡的意義。」
草間彌生首個鏡屋作品大受好評，隨即在翌年展出第二個版本，並命名為《偷窺秀／永恆的愛》。這次房間內沒有任何雕塑類物體，觀眾被安排在作品空間之外，藝術家鼓勵大家透過小窗窺視六角形場地，以及其中由鏡子和藍、綠、紅、黃閃爍燈泡所組成的空間。記者及藝評人亞瑟·盧博形容，這些初次登場的鏡盒所帶來的視覺體驗，正是草間在60年代紐約都市生活的反映：「這與紐約一類大城市的生活經驗十分接近——在帝國大廈等摩天大廈高處眺望，夜景滿佈閃爍的光點；在街上，人群內的眾多面孔將個體的自我意識抹去」（亞瑟·盧博，<序幕>，路易絲·內里與後藤貴哉（音譯）編，《草間彌生》，紐約，2012年，頁29）。1960年代中的《陽具原野》和《偷窺秀／永恆的愛》是草間彌生往後所有鏡房和鏡盒作品的基礎，而本作則毫無疑問帶有1966年首個六角形鏡盒作品的影子。
自2014年起，全球有超過11間國際級博物館和文化機構將無限鏡屋納入館藏，見證了這系列作品對世界各地觀眾帶來的震撼。如今，洛杉磯的布洛德博物館、倫敦的泰特現代藝術館、華盛頓的赫希洪博物館、邁阿密的魯貝爾博物館，以及多倫多的安大略美術館等機構都在展出草間彌生的大型鏡屋作品。一如各地博物館的鏡屋館藏，本作《My Heart is Flying to the Universe》為觀眾提供一個超脫日常體驗的空間，讓人置身於遼闊奇幻的草間彌生宇宙。