Yayoi Kusama

Fireflies on the Water
2002

Not on view

Date
2002

Classification
Installations

Medium
Mirrors, plexiglass, lights, and water

Dimensions
Overall: 111 × 144 1/2 × 144 1/2in. (281.9 × 367 × 367 cm)

Accession number
2003.322

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Postwar Committee and the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and partial gift of Betsy Wittenborn Miller

Rights and reproductions
© artist or artist’s estate

API
artworks/19436

Fireflies on the Water is a room-sized installation that is meant to be viewed in solitude, one person at a time. It consists of a small, darkened room lined with mirrors on all sides; a pool of water in the center of the space into which a dock-like viewing platform protrudes; and 150 small lights hanging from the ceiling. In tandem, these components create a dazzling effect of direct and reflected light, emanating from both the mirrors and the water’s surface. Space appears infinite, with no top or bottom, beginning or end. Like Yayoi Kusama’s earliest room-sized installations—including Infinity Mirror Room (1965), in which she combined mirrors and her signature polka-dotted phallic protrusions in an enclosed chamber—Fireflies embodies an almost hallucinatory approach to reality. While related to the artist’s personal mythology and therapeutic working process, it also refers to sources as varied as the myth of Narcissus and Kusama’s native Japanese landscape.

Videos

Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002

Audio

Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002

From Yayoi Kusama

0:00

Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002

0:00

Narrator: On the other side of this door is Yayoi Kusama's 2002 installation, Fireflies on the Water. It's materials are simple—mirrors, water, and one-hundred-and-fifty small lights—but its effects are complex.
As the title suggests, the lights feel almost natural, like fireflies like a tranquil summer night. The pools of water create an incredible sense of stillness. And as you enter the mirrored space, you see endless images of yourself, reflected off into the deep distance.
The work creates the feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at once. Kusama is eighty-three years old. She’s been an incredibly prolific artist—in part because her psychic life has been marked by struggle, and art has been her best weapon. As a young child, Kusama had hallucinations in which certain images or patterns would overwhelm her visual field—growing to infinity, threatening her with obliteration. In some of her earlier works, there’s something unnerving about the idea that things might go on and on without end. But the feeling of this work is very different. After five decades as a productive artist, Kusama had become free to invite us to forget all limits, to abandon our sense of self, and to give in to a kind of meditative magic.