Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room Entrance, AGO, 2025.
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – Let’s Survive Forever, offers an immersive encounter with one of the artist’s most iconic installations. Within the mirrored space, silver spheres are suspended from the ceiling and arranged on the floor, creating a disorienting yet meditative environment where reflections extend in all directions. At the centre of the installation, a mirrored column invites viewers to peer into a seemingly endless field of floating orbs. The effect is both spatial and psychological, echoing Kusama’s long-standing interest in repetition, perception, and the dissolving boundary between the self and the environment.
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room, inside view of the column.
First created in 2018 and now extended at the AGO through May 2026, Let’s Survive Forever is both an artwork and a phenomenon. It installed within the AGO thanks to the generosity of over 4,700 #InfinityAGO donors and the support of the David Yuile & Mary Elizabeth Hodgson Fund—a gesture that speaks to the collective power of Kusama’s vision, and the public’s deep longing to dwell within it.
Over more than seven decades, Yayoi Kusama has reshaped the landscape of contemporary art by collapsing the boundaries between inner world and outer cosmos, object and environment, repetition and rupture. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, and active since the early 1950s, she has moved between continents and disciplines with unwavering intensity, producing paintings, performances, immersive installations, films, writings, and public art that defy containment. Her influence spans movements such as Pop, Minimalism, and Psychedelia, yet exceeds any of them. Kusama does not merely work within art history; she transforms it.
Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room Installation, AGO, 2025.
It was in 1965 that she created her first Infinity Mirror Room, a radical spatial experiment that built upon the repetitive gestures of her paintings and sculptures. With mirrors, she found not only a material but a metaphysical medium, one that allowed her to render infinity tangible, to confront both the vastness of the universe and the collapse of the self. Since then, she has created over twenty unique rooms, each a meditation on limitlessness, each a confrontation with mortality, madness, wonder, and the unknown.
In Let’s Survive Forever, this confrontation is distilled into an experience at once intimate and infinite. The mirror does not lie, but it multiplies. Standing within the room, we see ourselves again and again and again until the line between self and space begins to blur. We are offered the illusion of endlessness, but also the gentle disquiet that such illusions can bring. It is this paradox—joy and vertigo, presence and erasure—that Kusama has explored throughout her life.
Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room, AGO, 2025.
The title, Let’s Survive Forever, sounds like a contradiction. Survival is temporal; forever is not. And yet it is precisely in that tension that Kusama’s work takes root. Her mirrored worlds do not offer permanence as fact, but as hope, as an act of imagination against despair. For an artist who has lived through war, exile, mental illness, and the slow burn of cultural erasure, the question is not whether survival is possible, but how we might dream it into our existence. Infinity, for Kusama, is not cold math; it is a luminous refusal to vanish.
Now in her 90s, Kusama continues to create with an urgency that belies age. Her recent works of vivid paintings, towering polka-dot sculptures, and ever-expanding rooms continue to represent the endurance of her ecstatic vision. To step inside her Infinity Mirrored Room is to participate in that vision, to be surrounded by the radiant residue of a life spent looking into the beyond.
Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room, AGO, 2025.
Let’s Survive Forever does not ask us to forget ourselves, but to see ourselves differently, to understand that our singularity is never separate from the collective. We are each a sphere among spheres, a reflection within reflections, a fleeting image in a room that will outlast us. And yet in that image, doubled, dissolved, dazzling—there is something true. Something that points to the enduring capacity of art to hold us, to mirror us, and to remind us that to survive is already an act of infinite imagination.
Text and photo: Yehyun Lee
*Exhibition information: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room – Let’s Survive Forever, until May 1, 2026, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto. Museum hours: Tue and Thurs 10:30am – 5pm, Wed and Fri 10:30am – 9pm, Sat and Sun 10:30am – 5:30pm.