Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern and Victoria Miro

Entry: Tate Modern - £11 adults / £9.50 concessions with Gift Aid donation; £10 adults / £8.50 concessions without Gift Aid donation; Victoria Miro – free

I heard Yayoi Kusama's name long before I knew who she was – she's one of the people name-checked in Le Tigre's song “Hot Topic”. Many years later I found an entry about her in an art book and got to go, “oooohh, so that's who she is”. She is, (for anybody who can't be bothered to click the link above), a prolific artist who has been working since the 1950s in a huge variety of mediums. In addition to her paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances, she is a novelist, a fashion designer and a film-maker. And she has also been a resident at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill since she voluntarily admitted herself in 1973, (apparently her studio is within walking distance of the hospital).

London has two Yayoi Kusama shows on at the moment, a big retrospective at the Tate Modern and a small exhibition of contemporary work – mostly paintings – at the Victoria Miro. The Victoria Miro show is not very exciting. I personally dislike Kusama's current paintings – large, square canvases painted with crude faces and figures in bright colours – though I do prefer the purely abstract ones in which blobs and lines pulsate across the canvas looking like things normally seen through a microscope. However, the three sculptures in the show are the most powerful things, (especially the giant, psychedelic eye that stares unblinking at the ceiling), so it's a shame there's so few of them.

Much, much, much more fun is the Tate Modern's retrospective, which is just overflowing with artworks and archival material from throughout Kusama's lengthy career. As she has experimented with so many mediums and techniques over the years the curators have chosen to focus “on the moments when she first worked in particular idioms”. However, while her output has varied widely in style over the years the use of organic shapes and obsessive repetition have remained constant.

There's so much to see in this show that I'm not even going to try to cover it all. I do want to mention a couple of things Kusama is best know for though – the “Accumulation sculptures” and the “Infinity Mirror Rooms”. The “Accumulation sculptures” are objects such as furniture and clothes entirely covered in stuffed fabric phalli and painted a single colour. The effect is completely surreal, it's still obvious what the object is, but at the same time it's totally transformed. The crazy abundance of growths always makes me think of fungi or the tentacles of some sea creature, as if the object has been abandoned and is actually being swallowed up by some alien lifeform.

Kusama's “Infinity Mirror Rooms” began in 1965. These are rooms with entirely mirrored walls, (and some other element such as painted floors and furniture), that the viewer can enter and walk around in. For this retrospective Kusama has made an entirely new one, her largest to date: “Infinity Mirror Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life”. It concludes the exhibition and if you attend on a Saturday afternoon you'll end up queuing to get in, but it's worth it. The room has a black floor and ceiling and the usual mirrored walls. Suspended from the ceiling at different heights are dozens, (maybe hundreds?), of small, circular lights that change colour slowly and gently. Sometimes they go out entirely, plunging the room into completely darkness. The whole effect is disorientating and vertiginous as all sense of depth and space is lost. It's also utterly beautiful and I felt as though I could be hanging in space surrounded by stars. I left the show with the distinct impression that this might be a good metaphor for what it's like to be Kusama herself.

To play us out, here's “Hot Topic” by Le Tigre: