In Pictures: 'Infinity Mirrored Room' by Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner Gallery

Adam Friedman emerged from the twinkling lights and reflecting water of Yayoi Kusama’s “infinity room” and groped for the right words. “Ethereal,” he said. Pause. “Calming.” Another pause. “Calming, ethereal and meditative, all at the same time.”

These were hard-won adjectives under the circumstances. Mr. Friedman, a 28-year-old computer salesman from Highland Park, N.J., had just spent nearly three hours in line at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, pelted intermittently by sleet and rain, inching slowly toward a very brief reward: 45 seconds in a mirror-lined room hung with 75 colored LED bulbs that flickered and pulsed in a celestial celebration. On a typical day, about 2,500 people turn out to take this brief trip to Ms. Kusama’s private cosmos. Almost from the moment that her multipart exhibition, “I Who Have Arrived in Heaven,” opened on Nov. 8, “Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” has become an art-world attraction to rival “Rain Room,” the immersive installation presented at the Museum of Modern Art this year.

“We had lines at the opening,” said Anita Ragusa, the manager of David Zwirner’s 19th Street galleries. “Once it hit social media, and people told their friends about it, everyone wanted to make sure to see it.”

The line usually begins forming about an hour before the gallery opens at 10 a.m. Throughout the day, it moves at a snail’s pace, as docents, hired to manage the flow, admit one or two people at a time to the twinkling-lights chamber, with the slow, steady regularity of a drip feed. About 1,000 will make it in. The show closes Dec. 21.

It is not the usual gallery crowd. Social media, especially photographs on Instagram, have spread the word to a broad, mostly young, demographic: tourists, students, followers of Ms. Kusama’s work, who saw her installation “Fireflies on the Water” at the retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year.

“Mirrored Room” offers a little something for everyone. It is a reflection on death and the afterlife. It is a planetarium contained in a room the size of a large walk-in closet. Cosmic and intimate at the same time, it merges inner and outer space, science and mysticism, the personal and the impersonal.

It also makes for the ultimate selfie. One click and there you are, floating in the universe, or rather, multiple yous, replicated over and over.

Ms. Kusama, the Japanese artist, now in her 80s, has stimulated a very contemporary set of nerve endings. Her recent work dovetails with a surge in artwork designed to propel viewers into an out-of-body experience. Visual artists like Doug Wheeler and James Turrell, who swaddle audiences in space-bending projected light, have pulled large crowds in recent shows. In immersive theater productions like Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More,” audiences mingle with performers and, to a large extent, construct their own stage experience.

“Video games and the nature of the web have trained people not to want to sit still and look, whether it’s in a proscenium-arch theater or a traditional art museum,” said Frank Rose, the author of “The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories.” “There’s a huge appetite for something more immersive and sensory, in which you can take a somewhat active role. You experience it with all your senses, and it’s all around you.”

Peter Wong, 25, a computer technician accompanying Mr. Friedman, had never been to an art exhibition. “I was an engineering major,” he said. “It’s always about numbers for me.” He read about Ms. Kusama’s installation on the web site Gizmodo.

Sarah Bradfield, 28, a New Yorker now living in Atlanta, said that she was not familiar with the artist but she had seen postings on Instagram. Like several others in the line, she had a small child in tow.

Nancy Lundebjerg, 54, an executive with the American Geriatrics Society, said that she became jealous when a friend posted a photograph of “Mirrored Room” on Instagram. She came loaded and ready to fire back, carrying a smartphone and a serious-looking Canon camera. “I feel as though this has the same buzz as ‘Rain Room,’ ” she said.

A subculture has developed around the exhibition. One day, a fan wrote “Happiness Begins Here” in colored chalk on the sidewalk to mark the end of the line. Sasha Kalachnikoff, a 3-year-old enthusiast, turned up (with her parents) dressed Kusama-style, with a bright-red wig cut in a severe bob, and a jacket decorated with giant white paper polka dots. Paul Amundarain, a Venezuelan artist, flew to New York with his girlfriend, Virginia Lameda, and, with the 45-second clock ticking, produced an engagement ring and popped the question.

Once in the line, remarkably few people bail out. Instead, they work the gallery’s three connecting rooms, leaving and rejoining the line. Some head to the show’s other mirrored infinity room, “Love Is Calling,” a cluster of polka-dotted inflated rubber biomorphic forms that undergo chameleonlike changes of color.

The tentacle room, as that installation is popularly known, admits groups of eight to 10. Its fast-moving line ends in a somewhat longer visit, about a minute and a half. Off to the side, there is no wait at all for “Manhattan Suicide Addict,” a wall-size video of Ms. Kusama, filmed from the neck up, reciting a poem she wrote in the 1960s after a suicide attempt in New York. There are no lines, either, for the exhibition of 27 new paintings by Ms. Kusama adjacent to the mirrored room.

Eventually, the door to the “Mirrored Room” swings open, and the lucky few at the head of the line are ushered inside. This is the final phase, when the docents really go to work. Paul Nissenbaum combined the functions of a doorman, bouncer, clocker and social director, herding the hopefuls into an antechamber and directing them to benches, where a game of musical chairs commenced.

Every 45 seconds, as a visitor exits, the queue shifted forward and rear ends wiggled down the benches in a synchronized wave. While Mr. Nissenbaum choreographed this kindergarten exercise, he also policed the mirrored room. Knocking discreetly on the door when his hand-held timer beeped, he escorted the visitor within back into the glare of the stark white waiting room all the while keeping up a friendly patter.

“It felt like eternity,” Mr. Wong said, after leaving the room. “Very surreal, seeing how small you are but how beautifully everything works together.”

Marina Kalontarova, 30, a New Yorker fresh out of medical school, emerged with a smile on her face. “I think she and I have a really similar idea of heaven,” she said.