Day 2 of Justin and my birthday staycation! We stayed for 3 days and it was really nice to spend some quality holiday time together, being tourists in our own country.
Woke up to start the day with a little breakfast buffet! The amount of free meals we get in the executive lounge (which you get access to if you stay in the suites) is something like breakfast, tea, second tea and an evening "snack" + free flow alcohol counter which is basically enough food for dinner. One could basically not have to go out to eat ever, but of course as you know, we hit all the free meals and still went out to eat, cause!
The lounge was mainly full of business travelers, since it was a weekday who were bored of the same food every day, but not us, we took e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g.
Justin surprise pre-booked tickets to the
Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the National Gallery because he knew I had been low key wanting to go. It was also the last month for the exhibition because we'd been putting it off, so we finally went!
Ok but surprise, surprise there is more to the exhibition than what we see on Instagram. We decided to skip a lot of the popular rooms because a) the queues were crazy long and b) her proper work looks a lot cooler. I put a side by side comparison and you can see how the spots in the room (picture on the left) are quite one dimensional and evenly spaced, versus one of her pumpkin drawings (pictured right) in which she uses spots of different sizes to make the pumpkin look three dimensional, which are really cool!
The interesting thing about the rooms that we did go to see is how they are surprisingly smaller than they look online because of the creative play with mirrors. I knew they were smaller for sure, but they are
really small. Though that said, I'm claustrophobic and I didn't feel any of that inside the Infinity Mirror Room - but also because we could only stand inside for long! No pics because I couldn't get the settings right in the mere 20 seconds we had, so we just enjoyed it like normal people.
Found an infinity box to stick our heads into though!
Not the same as the interactive sticking room, which was outside the exhibition and had another long line, so yep, we skipped that too haha. We are the worse museum participants ever, ha!
Personal favourite room because I love the look of it and the concept. Called the Narcissus Garden, Yayoi Kusama originally massed produced 1,500 plastic silver globes and sold teach of them on the streets in Venice 1966 for just $2.00 each, titling it "YOUR NARCISSIUM [sic] FOR SALE" in protest of the sale of commercial art. How cool it would have been to buy one of the balls from her for just $2.00 (though it would be worth about $15 today)! I wonder how much they cost her to make? The ones here are an upgrade, made of stainless steel, and maybe an irony as to how economics does benefit art.
Small goals but we managed to find the second floor windows to get a nice shot of the balloons - the things Justin lets me do, hehe.
Thanks to this sweetheart for arranging everything for our date day!
I realised this post is kinda long already, so I'll finish up about the rest of our stay soon!
