Viral Infinity Mirror Rooms arrive in SF, sold out until Nov. 1

SFMOMA’s latest exhibit features just two works and costs $10 on top of admission. You can spend around three minutes enjoying it before you’re ushered out the door. Still, tickets are completely booked for the month of October (you can purchase them Thursday, Oct. 5, for the month of November, while they last).

Perhaps it’s because the exhibit features Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. The immersive art pieces, which feature mirrored walls, floors and ceilings, are coveted selfie spots. In the past decade, the 94-year-old artist’s work has become a viral phenomenon, in large part thanks to the advent of Instagram. Patrons have reportedly waited in hourslong lines for just minutes inside one of the rooms. 

It’s a transportive minute. When I stepped into one of the new SFMOMA infinity rooms, it took my eyes a moment to adjust. Not to the darkness, but to the emptiness. The museum was gone. All that existed were thousands of polka dots, my reflection and my reflection’s reflection. The landscape — if it could even be called that — stretched infinitely in every direction. There was no horizon.

The exhibit, titled “Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love,” consists of two of Kusama’s mirror rooms: 2013’s “Love is Calling” and 2023’s “Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love,” which is Kusama’s newest room and the exhibit’s main attraction. SFMOMA also recently added “Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart,” a new Kusama sculpture, to its installations until August 2025. (“Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love” is not part of the “Infinite Love” exhibit.)

In spite of its welcoming title, “I Would Offer My Love,” the newest infinity room, is oddly imposing from the outside. It’s a white cube, about as tall as a basketball hoop, sitting in the middle of a white room with office lighting. The only interruption to the exhibit’s blank sterility is the white cube’s windows, which are colored orange, red, blue and green, and arranged on its walls like the holes in Swiss cheese. It sort of looks like a cubicle designed by a kindergartener.

Inside is a different story. Those windows, it turns out, are for looking out, not looking in. They reflect endlessly in the cube’s mirrored walls, unfolding into an infinite lattice of colorful polka dots. Greens and reds dot into the distance. I imagine that this is what traffic lights see when they dream. 

Kusama’s mirror rooms are pleasantly disorienting. There are no reference points in a room with nothing but reflections. You quickly lose your sense of direction. You can look outside through the windows, but it’s hard to tell what’s a window and what’s a reflection of a window. The room’s edges seem to soften a little. 

After about a minute, a staff member opens the door, puncturing the illusion. 

The second room, “Love is Calling,” features polka-dotted tentacles protruding from the mirrored ceiling and floor. This room has no windows; light comes instead from the tentacles’ neon glow. It reminded me of a cave, complete with stalagmites and stalactites. The alien landscape has no beginning and no end. 

Waiting in the line for the exhibit, I heard someone remark that Kusama’s mirror rooms were “made for Instagram.” I disagree. Infinity rooms are made for awe, and awe just happens to make for good engagement.

Kusama’s rooms are effectively an analog form of virtual reality. Mirroring lays an imaginary world over the real one. You find yourself plucked out of space, dropped into a domain that you can’t square with your own. 

People often speak of art transporting you to a different world. It’s rare that the transportation is so literal.

Tickets to “Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love” are sold out until Oct. 31. November tickets go on sale Thursday, Oct. 5, at 10 a.m.