CLEVELAND — Five decades before social media became dominant in our culture, Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama began offering the experience of “virtual reality” through her artistic study of infinite space.

Still a prolific creator producing daily in her Japan studio, the 89-year-old artist continues to be spotlighted in the traveling exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. The immersive installation of seven interactive rooms, large-scale paintings, soft sculptures, works on paper, and historical accounts of her 1960s artistic demonstrations can be seen through Sept. 30 at the only Midwest location for the show, the Cleveland Museum of Art.

VIDEO: Emily Liebert of the Cleveland Museum of Art discusses Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors

“She’s thinking about the idea of infinity, which has interested her from the start of her career,” said Emily Liebert, associate curator of contemporary art for the museum. “She’s thinking about it through basic, analog means — light, repetition, reproduction, reflection — those kinds of things that really resonate now in a contemporary age, where we are thinking about media and virtual reality.

“She was thinking about this experience well before it became as simple to technology as it is now.”

Infinity Mirrors was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and is traveling to six venues. The stop in Cleveland is the fifth on the tour.

Kusama’s exhibition invites guests to encounter the first mirrored “infinity room” she created in 1965, Phalli’s Field, as well as one she created in 2016, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins. She began using mirrors in the 1960s to achieve her vision of repetitive forms.

Immersive experience

Throughout her career, Kusama has created more than 20 infinity mirror installations, ranging from freestanding box rooms to peep show-like chambers lined with mirrors that incorporate lights, sculptures, and brightly colored balls. In her early years, she did a series of self-portraits in which she used her body to activate the spaces she created.

Visitors to the Cleveland show, a ticket-only event, will see seven such rooms scattered throughout the exhibition, including an installation exclusive to the venue, Where the Lights of My Heart Go.

Museum staff explain how to get the most of the immersive experience as visitors step onto a platform in a darkened room, either individually or in groups of no more than three. The door closes behind the viewer, who is immersed in an illusion of infinite space for up to 30 seconds.

“There’s a step going up, and it’s a low door, so crouch down a little,” one staff member told a group waiting to go into a room. “It’s dark, so let your eyes adjust.”

The exhibition includes other key works in which Kusama explores time and space, including her most recent project, My Eternal Soul, a series of large-scale colorful paintings started in 2009. Sixteen of the 550 pieces she has created for the project are part of the Cleveland installation.

The most interactive piece in the show, The Obliteration Room (2002-present) invites museum visitors to place colorful dots on furniture, walls, and other objects to transform an all-white room through “communal obliteration.”

Kusama has not attended one of her shows for about six years but produced a video for the installation that guests can watch at the end of the show. Dressed in her signature polka-dotted attire and a bright orange wig, the artist tells viewers she wants her work to push society toward peace.

“The effect of infinite, constant repetition leads us to finding our ever-expanding hope,” she says in Japanese that is translated at the bottom of the screen. “I spread that hope across the ground and with the intention of walking through my life, I threw my body over it.”

Life shapes art

Throughout her lifetime, Kusama has held many titles: painter, sculptor, performer, writer, fashion designer, minimalist, surrealist, even film producer.

She was born March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, Japan, into a family of merchants who owned a seed nursery. Her parents were strict, especially her mother, said Mika Yoshitake, curator of Infinity Mirrors.

“Her mother never wanted her to be an artist and would destroy her artwork,” Yoshitake said.

But Kusama was ambitious and driven, the curator said. When she was a teenager, she sent her drawings to renowned artist Georgia O’Keeffe seeking advice. She developed her technique sewing fabric sculptures when she worked in a parachute factory sewing military uniforms during World War II.

She was trained in traditional Japanese painting but was drawn to the abstract, Yoshitake said.

Kusama moved to New York City in the late 1950s and garnered national attention when she staged impromptu live performances to protest the Vietnam War that involved nude individuals painted in large, brightly colored polka dots. She wrote President Richard Nixon, stating that “anatomic explosions are better than atomic explosions” — her efforts to mock war violence, Yoshitake said.

“She was quite a performer. At one point I believe she had more mentions in the newspapers than [artist] Andy Warhol because she did these guerrilla-like performances in the streets,” Yoshitake said.

Her struggles with mental illness flow through her work. She frequently endured hallucinations and became captivated by polka dots. Pieces were often driven by her obsession with phallic symbols and an attempt to conquer her fear of sex, steered by the psychological effects of being forced by her mother at a young age to spy on her philandering father, Yoshitake said.

“I think her biography is an important, crucial part of her art and is visible in many ways, as is the mental illness she has been struggling with since she was a child,” said Reto Thuring, curator of contemporary art for the Cleveland museum. “I think that is one lens to look through at her art. I think it isn’t the only lens, but it has a presence.”

She moved back to Japan in the 1970s and while suffering from a bout of depression wrote novels and created dark collages. She checked herself into a mental institution that eventually became her permanent residence. As an artist, she was forgotten.

“She was seen as an outcast when she went back to Japan because the artworld saw her through these guerrilla-like performances when she was nude, and in a very conservative culture like Japan, people didn’t take her seriously,” Yoshitake said.

A New York retrospective of her work in 1989 breathed new life into her career, as did a 1993 solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in Italy.

A major retrospective in 2012 that included an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, coupled with the explosion in popularity of the photo app Instagram, continued to propel her into the international spotlight at the age of 83.

Once known as the “Polka Dot Princess,” Kusama was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2016. The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in 2017.

Kusama still paints daily, working on pieces for My Eternal Soul.

Getting tickets

Because of the event’s popularity, tickets are being sold online and by phone from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every Monday throughout the show’s duration. Membership and public pre-sales were offered in May and June.

Elizabeth Bolander, director of audience insights and services, said those serious about seeing the show should try to buy their tickets this Monday, the only day that tickets will be available for any open date and time slot through the duration of the show.

After that, she said, the limited Monday ticket sales will be for that specific week only. The museum expects to have about 200 tickets left to sell to the public each week.

“We are really trying to get as many people as possible to get advance reservations,” she said.

The museum has sold just more than half of the 100,000 tickets it is offering through membership and public sales, Bolander said.

Pamela Barron, who lives in the Cleveland area, said she ordered tickets for the first weekend of August, on the advice of museum staff who said The Obliteration Room will be more exciting to see after visitors interact with the installation.

Thuring said she and others at the museum are surprised by the response to the exhibition.

“I think we all had an idea that it would be popular with audiences, but certainly not anything close to what it has been,” Thuring said.

Contact Roberta Gedert at rgedert@theblade.com, 419-724-6075, or on Twitter @RoGedert.

First Published July 15, 2018, 11:00 a.m.