This photo captures my fiancé Lina and myself at Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms” exhibit at Tate Modern in London, taken in March 2024. The installation, called “Chandelier of Grief,” uses mirrors and light to explore ideas about symmetry.
The centrepiece of the artwork is a chandelier surrounded by six mirrors arranged in a regular hexagonal prism. This creates an interesting visual effect—an infinite lattice of chandeliers extending in all directions, with each reflected chandelier appearing at the centre of symmetry within this lattice.
What we’re experiencing is a visual representation of a hexagonal lattice, one of the five two-dimensional Bravais lattices. Mathematically, it represents a discrete group of isometries in two-dimensional Euclidean space. The point group of this hexagonal lattice is isomorphic to the dihedral group 
, highlighting its sixfold rotational symmetry and mirror reflection properties.
Physically, the hexagonal lattice emerges as the ground state configuration for systems of particles interacting via certain potentials, such as the Lennard-Jones potential, in the thermodynamic limit. Moreover, the hexagonal lattice is realised in materials like graphene, where carbon atoms arrange themselves in this highly symmetric pattern, leading to its unique properties.
Kusama’s installation is not only aesthetically pleasing but also serves as a visual representation of abstract concepts in mathematics and physics. The infinite reflections illustrate how artistic expression can intersect with scientific principles, making complex ideas accessible and engaging to a wider audience.