Yayoi Kusama’s 'The obliteration room' once looked like this

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room (installation view) 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery, commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery / Gift of the artist through the QAG Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc.

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room (installation view) 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery, commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery / Gift of the artist through the QAG Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Yayoi Kusama / Courtesy: Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc. / View full image

We can’t believe our interactive installation once was pristine white. The obliteration room 2002-present is transformed over time as coloured dots accumulate in the space, so enter the world of leading contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and watch as colourful dot stickers are added to a range of white furniture and surfaces and help ‘obliterate’ our domestic space.

Why dots? When Kusama was young, she started seeing the world through a screen of dots, they covered everything she saw — even her own body. In her artwork, Kusama uses dots, she calls this process ‘obliteration’ — the complete destruction of every trace of something.

Watch | 'The obliteration room' is transformed with coloured dot stickers

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photograph: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers
Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photograph: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photograph: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers
Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photograph: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present (Installation view GOMA 2017-18) / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photographs: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present (Installation view GOMA 2017-18) / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photographs: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA / View full image

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Japan b.1929 / The obliteration room 2002 to present / Furniture, white paint, dot stickers / Collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Queensland Art Gallery. Commissioned Queensland Art Gallery, Australia. Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Yayoi Kusama / View full image

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s The obliteration room 2002 to present, GOMA Children’s Art Centre 2017 / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photograph: Chloe Callistermon © QAGOMA.

Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s The obliteration room 2002 to present, GOMA Children’s Art Centre 2017 / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc / Photograph: Chloe Callistermon © QAGOMA. / View full image

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    Yayoi Kusama’s 'The obliteration room'

    Renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s The obliteration room 2002–present is an interactive work initially developed by Kusama in collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery as a children’s project for ‘The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ in 2022. The obliteration room consists of a domestic environment recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which are painted completely white. While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour, it specificity functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application to every available surface of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots. The choice of a domestic environment with specifically local characteristics is intended to create an air of familiarity that makes participants, especially children, comfortable enough to engage with the work with little or no prompting. The obliteration room 2002–present Dots first emerged in Kusama’s work in the early 1960s as the structural inverse of the Infinity net paintings (illustrated) that preoccupied her after 1958, as the negative spaces between the loops of her painterly netting. During this period, dots began to appear on the surfaces of her sculptures and installations, which recalled the hallucinations she had suffered as a child, in which her surroundings were entirely covered with repeating patterns. Later in the decade, dots had developed into an artistic strategy that the artist described as ‘self-obliteration’. A prominent feature of her ‘happenings’ and performances of the period, and usually daubed onto the bodies of participants, dots symbolically neutralised the ego, which Kusama blamed for the horror and destruction resulting from warfare. Infinity nets 2000 Kusama’s dots have proliferated as her installations have grown in scale and ambition, and she continues to frame the dots as traces of her own childhood trauma. The past decade in fact has seen direct representations in the artist’s work of an idealised, ‘lost’ childhood. The exuberance of children buzzing around The obliteration room, stickers accumulating on its clinical surfaces, bears a striking resemblance to this imagined childhood. Indeed, the work functions by mobilising the desires of children to transgress the ‘look but don’t touch’ restriction of conventional museum culture by associating this sensibility with that of parental restrictions in the family home. The white room is gradually covered with stickers over the course of the exhibition, the space changing measurably with the passage of time as the dots accumulate with the help of thousands of collaborators. Such is the appeal of the work, particularly on social media, that its popularity has proliferated around the world. The extraordinary capacity of Kusama’s work, which adapts to diverse contexts and audiences, underlines the fact that, at 85 years of age, she is more of her time now that at any point in her long career. Delve deeper into the QAGOMA Collection
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    Before the first dot. Yayoi Kusama’s 'The obliteration room'

    The installation of Yayoi Kusama’s popular interactive children’s project has taken the work to a new scale, filling our Children’s Art Centre at GOMA. This space has been transformed into a series of domestic—style rooms, reminiscent of the average Australian home, filled with furniture and objects painted entirely white. This functions as a blank canvas that becomes ‘obliterated’ over the course of the exhibition through the application of brightly coloured dot stickers. This series of images shows The obliteration room 2002-present in its pristine state before the exhibition opened, along with the application of the very first dot stickers. You can also read more about Kusama and the exhibition.