The acclaimed Japanese artist, whose installation became the set of the singer’s 2016 Brit Awards performance, died earlier this month
Back in 2016, Adele spent an hour exploring Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, an art installation by Yayoi Kusama housed at the Broad in Los Angeles. The singer roamed the space, which created an eternity out of glass, and captured the experience on camera. It resulted in her stunning performance at the 2016 Brit Awards, where she sang the appropriately nostalgic “When We Were Young.”
Kusama, an acclaimed Japanese artist, died earlier this month at the age of 97 at a hospital in Tokyo. “Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry,” a statement on her official website reads. “She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul.”
For Adele, making Infinity Mirrored Room part of her performance offered an opportunity to “see different versions of yourself from every angle,” she said in 2016. “‘When We Were Young’ is kind of based on my life from childhood up until now. I definitely feel like standing in that room for an hour, I saw things in myself and of myself that I haven’t noticed before.”
Kusama spoke with the Broad for an exclusive interview when the installation arrived at the museum in 2015, two years after its creation. “Eternal unlimited universe, love for humanity, and longing for peace in the world — these concepts become increasingly serious through the development of my philosophy of life and art,” she said at the time. “I integrate my philosophy about the eternity of inter-relationships into my artworks. You can share the information, but the experience is your own.”
