Yayoi Kusama. Infinity Mirrored Room: The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.

A room shaped like a box

From outside, the work looks like a large, plain box. The Broad in Los Angeles gives its size as about 2.9 metres high and about 4.2 metres on each side. There is a door. Visitors queue for their turn.

Once the door closes, everything changes. The four walls and ceiling are mirrors. Underfoot is a shallow pool of water, flat and dark. From the ceiling hang hundreds of coloured LED lights at different heights, glowing and fading in rhythm. The mirrors multiply them in every direction. The water multiplies them downward.

Within seconds the room disappears. Only points of light remain, stretching to the end of sight, like a sky with no ground.

The list of materials The Broad records is very dry: wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, acrylic balls, water. From these ordinary things Kusama builds a complete illusion.

Forty five seconds

The work was made in 2013 and first shown in Kusama's exhibition I Who Have Arrived in Heaven at David Zwirner, New York, late that year. In early 2014 The Broad added it to its collection. Ever since, there has usually been a line in front of that small door, sometimes a very long one. Many people wait far longer than the time they are allowed inside.

The Broad gives each visit about 45 seconds. According to the museum, the figure was chosen after consulting the artist's studio.

Forty five seconds is very short. Inside the room, though, it passes differently. No clock, no corner for the eye to rest on, only flickering lights. Time seems to stretch. Then the door opens, ordinary light floods in, and the visitor steps back into a room with edges, a floor, an exit sign.

The limit does not make the work smaller. It makes it clearer. Infinity only means something next to an ending.

The self dissolving into points of light

Kusama worked with repetition from very early on. Dots, nets, multiplied forms covering every surface. She often spoke of self obliteration, of letting the self dissolve into a boundless field.

The mirror room is the clearest form of that idea. The person inside sees themselves reflected hundreds of times, growing smaller among the lights. They are no longer a viewer in front of a work. They become part of it, one point in the net.

The title points the same way. The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away. Each light could be a star, or a person, very far away and at the same time very near.

A universe sized for one

Today Kusama's mirror rooms appear in many museums and in countless photographs. People photograph themselves among the lights. But the photograph cannot keep the main thing: the sense of standing in a space where the eye finds nowhere to stop.

Kusama made other mirror rooms, with other light and materials, such as Filled with the Brilliance of Life. Each is a variation on the same question: where does a person stand inside a space without limits? The room at The Broad keeps something simple: a small box, a surface of water, points of light, and a short stretch of time, long enough to forget where you are.