In 1966, on the front lawn of the Italian Pavillion at the 33rd Venice Biennale, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama curated Narcissus Garden (1966–2024), an installation of 1400 stainless steel balls strewn throughout the gallery’s ground floor like a river of chromatic objects.

The National Gallery of Victoria has recently acquired Narcissus Garden in celebration of their just-opened retrospective, Yayoi Kusama. The installation centres around notions of reflection, multiplication and distortion and plays with our perception of depth, scale, weight and space. Each ball protrudes a mirage of the audience’s own reflection. In this way (along with its title), the work materialises the notion of narcissism: “Too much interest in and admiration for your own physical appearance and/or your own abilities.”

The concept of narcissism first emerged in 8 CE in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Greek myth that introduced the consequence of vanity through the tale of Narcissus. According to Ovid, Narcissus stared too long at his reflection in the silvery lake and was subsequently punished to only ever love the transient reflection of himself.

In 2011, critic Jennifer Allen wrote in Frieze magazine that narcissism was “back in fashion.” “Narcissism,” Allen argues, “appears as a necessity in our society of the spectacle.” She cites psychiatrist Dr. John Gunderson, who expressed concern about the proposed changes to remove Narcissistic Personality Disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), deeming it “draconian.” Allen critiqued the emerging trend of rendering mental disorders biological and “thus treatable with drugs,” favouring instead that they be considered within the context of social conditions. She writes, “You don’t need to be a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst to see that narcissism has shifted from a pathological condition to a norm, if not a means of survival.” 

The repetition of reflective surfaces throughout Kusama’s work brings to mind Ovid's Narcissus and, in some ways, is associated with the social condition Allen describes. In 1966, Narcissus Garden prompted viewers to see themselves as part of the bohemian elite. By 2024, the installation has evolved to encourage taking selfies, inviting the audience to reflect on their role in a society obsessed with spectacle.

The theme of narcissism in Kusama’s installation is a fragment of her larger theoretical considerations of illusion. Her works layer and accumulate motifs as a technique for confusing reality. Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, for instance, include layered mirror boxes that evoke the experience of perceptual distortion. It is this signatory technique of layering to the point of intentional confusion that affirms Kusama's consideration of obliteration.

The first two rooms of the NGV exhibition house Kusama’s earlier Infinity Nets (1958–late 1960s). These geometric paintings determine the foundation of her later Infinity Mirror Rooms and her signatory dot motifs. Kusama debuted the Infinity Net paintings in October 1959 at the Brata Gallery in New York. These works consist of repetitious, scallop-shaped circles that blanket the composition, as if a virus were spreading throughout the body. They represent the reductive works she created during the 1950s, at the height of the Minimalist movement in New York. 

In the exhibition, a link also emerges between these paintings and her documentary short, Kusama’s Self Obliteration (1967), a psychedelic journey whereby Kusama wades in a green dress through pond water, repeatedly painting a red dot. She describes this work as stemming from her hallucinations, in which she sees herself engulfed in patterns of nets and dots. While her paintings typically build a whole from repeated singular elements, "Self Obliteration" breaks the whole into individual parts. This work exemplifies Kusama's concept of self-obliteration, which she suggests can be hastened by narcissism.