How light moves through Yayoi Kusama’s art

Light does several kinds of work in Yayoi Kusama’s art. It appears as a glow within a painted surface, catches on glitter and metallic pigments, and multiplies between mirrors until the edges of a room become difficult to locate. At the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, a new exhibition follows these shifts across drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures and installations.

The Light Spreads Out, and Glittering Things Start Appearing All Around Me runs from 8 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. The museum’s eighteenth exhibition brings together early works from the 1950s and later experiments with colour and reflection. It also introduces Ladder to Heaven (2024) to audiences in Japan for the first time.

The exhibition opened following Kusama’s death on 14 August 2026, aged 97, as announced by the museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation. Its focus remains on a question that accompanied her practice over decades: how an experience of light might become a drawing, an object or an environment.

From a painted glow to a reflective surface

The entrance gallery presents OBLITERATION OF STARS (GOLD) and OBLITERATION OF STARS (SILVER), both from 2010. Coloured dots spread across metallic grounds, bringing their painted surfaces into contact with the changing light around them. Nearby, the undulating forms of LIFE catch reflections across mosaic tiles containing metal leaf.

Paint and mosaic offer different kinds of radiance. One depends on the meeting of colour and sheen across a canvas; the other changes as a visitor moves around a three-dimensional form. The exhibition establishes this distinction early, then returns to it through materials as varied as enamel, glitter, mirrored glass and electric lights.

Images emerging from darkness

Kusama described the hallucinations she experienced in childhood through images of radiance and flashing light. Drawing offered a way to record those experiences. The second-floor gallery places works such as A Flower #6 (1953) and A SPIRIT (1956) alongside later developments of her visual language.

After moving to the United States in 1957 and establishing herself in New York the following year, Kusama expanded the repeated net across the canvas. In Infinity Nets (2) (1958), a thin application of white allows the darker ground to remain visible. The result suggests a wavering veil, with depth emerging through repetition rather than conventional perspective.

The artist connected the series with the glittering Pacific Ocean she had seen from an aeroplane. That association returns in Pacific Ocean Morning (1979), an enamel work on paperboard made after her return to Japan in 1973. Metallic paint gives the small surface a shifting brilliance.

Other works extend this attention to lustre through collage and glitter. Scattering Stamens (1995) combines printed matter with pastel, acrylic and ink. The screenprints Fish (1986) and Lemon Squash (1) (1999) incorporate glitter, while SELF-OBLITERATION (1980) brings it to an assemblage of everyday objects. Light becomes a physical property of the work, carried by its materials.

Colour that seems to emit light

On the third floor, acrylic paintings made between 1986 and 2015 place colour at the centre of the encounter. In The Galaxy (1988), repeated forms and contrasting hues create an impression of luminosity without an electric source. The nets and dots still organise the surface, but their colour relationships make its edges appear to vibrate.

Infinity Nets TWO (1998) belongs to the continuing development of that repeated motif. Alongside these paintings, works from My Eternal Soul show how Kusama brought nets and dots into increasingly varied compositions of eyes, profiles, organic forms and other figures.

Produced from 2009 to 2021, My Eternal Soul comprises approximately 900 paintings. The exhibition includes thirteen works from the series, among them OBLITERATION OF LIFE (2011), FORM OF LOVE (2012) and APPEARANCE OF GOD (2015). Their dense arrangements give the viewer many points of entry, while metallic grounds in the wider series introduce another response to the light falling on the canvas.

Light becomes a space

With Longing for Infinite Heaven (2020), the exhibition moves from the surface of a work to an optical environment. Blinking electric lights repeat across mirrored glass, producing the impression of a space that continues beyond its physical enclosure. Kusama first presented a mirror room in 1965 and introduced electric lights into the format the following year.

The changing reflections draw the viewer into the same field as the work. This relationship connects with Kusama’s idea of self-obliteration: the loosening of the boundary between a person and their surroundings through repetition and proliferation.

The route ends on the rooftop with Narcissus Garden (1966/2026) and Ladder to Heaven (2024). Stainless-steel spheres scatter reflections of the building, visitors and daylight across the terrace. The ladder concentrates repetition along a vertical axis, with facing mirrors reflecting the sky and ground. The exhibition’s movement from a glow within an image to light shared with the surrounding world becomes tangible here, in the open air.

Visiting the exhibition

The Light Spreads Out, and Glittering Things Start Appearing All Around Me is on view at Yayoi Kusama Museum, 107 Bentencho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, from 8 October 2026 to 31 January 2027.

The museum opens Thursday to Sunday and on national holidays, from 11:00 to 17:30. It closes for the New Year period from 28 December 2026 to 6 January 2027. Tickets must be purchased in advance through the museum’s website; none are sold at the door. Admission is for a specific 90-minute time slot. Tickets cost JPY 1,100 for adults and JPY 600 for visitors aged 6–18; children under six enter free.

Project Credits

Exhibition: The Light Spreads Out, and Glittering Things Start Appearing All Around Me
Artist: Yayoi Kusama
Museum: YAYOI KUSAMA MUSEUM / @yayoikusamamuseum
Location: 107 Bentencho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Dates: 8 October 2026–31 January 2027
Artworks and images: © YAYOI KUSAMA, except where otherwise credited
Portrait photography: Yusuke Miyazaki
Museum exterior photography: Kawasumi-Kobayashi Kenji Photograph Office, as identified in the image caption