First mirror room: "Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field"

In November 1965, at Richard Castellane Gallery in New York, Yayoi Kusama unveiled Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field, her first fully realized mirror room installation. Although the precise day is undocumented, this month marks the debut of a format that would become one of the most influential innovations in late twentieth-century installation art.

The work consisted of a floor densely covered with hundreds of soft, phallic textile forms painted with red dots, surrounded by mirrored walls that multiplied the objects into an apparently endless field. Visitors entering the room found themselves immersed in a disorienting environment where boundaries between body, object, and space dissolved. Drawing on her philosophy of "self-obliteration," Kusama used repetition, reflection, and sexual imagery to explore infinity, anxiety, and the loss of ego.

Historically, Phalli’s Field broke new ground by transforming sculptural objects into an engulfing environment, anticipating later installation practices and challenging the prevailing dominance of painting and discrete sculpture. The mirror room format would become central to Kusama’s legacy, inspiring countless subsequent works and global exhibitions.

Within women’s and art history, the November 1965 installation stands as a radical intervention by a Japanese woman artist in the male-dominated New York avant-garde. At a time when minimalism and pop were largely defined by men, Kusama’s immersive, bodily, and psychologically charged environment offered an alternative trajectory for contemporary art, foregrounding female experience, mental illness, and the destabilization of the self.