Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Mariko Mori: Pure Land

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Mariko Mori: Pure Land

by John McGee

Mariko Mori, Play With Me, 1994, 305 x 367cm, Fuji super gloss print 
(Images courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo)

Mariko Mori is not Bjork. She is neither a bodhisattva nor an alien. (She's actually the daughter of an engineering professor and a Breughel scholar, and a relative of of the real-estate magnate.) But such issues of dressed-up identity and spirituality characterize Mori's first major solo show in Japan. 

In Cindy Sherman-style photo murals from the mid-1990s, Mori tweaks the typecast roles of women in Japanese society. As a silver-skinned alien OL, she offers tea on a busy street corner. As a bewildered manga warrior, she grips a machine-gun in a video arcade. In these personal auditions for the perfect postmodern Japanese girl, Mori, who studied at Tokyo's Bunka Fashion College and New York's Whitney Independent Study Program, reflects and complicates real, if fantasy-prone, spaces of the city—Akihabara electronics outlets, cos-play (costume play) salons and Harajuku hangouts.

Mariko Mori, Nirvana, 1997,
3D video installation

Later in the '90s, Mori reoriented from contemporary issues to the visual splendor of Asian art history and MTV. The consistently high production values of Mori's material-rich music videos, drawings and installations show off her keen sense of color and her interest in traditional outfits in the most eye-catching new materials. 

But the distracting surface hides an empty center. Mori no longer poses as warped Japanese pop idols, but as the central goddess in her own religion (Buddhism) or as a rock star with similar pretensions. In the VH-1-ready Kumano, kimono-clad Mori sings pretty, lilting songs a la Enya (husband and fellow artist, Ken Ikeda, wrote the music) while running through the tourist board-approved woods of Wakayama Prefecture. 

Mori's landscapes are the romanticized cliches of TV commercials—the meditative desert in the video Nirvana, enchanted and mysterious forests and waterfalls in Kumano. Echoing the escapism of '90s trance culture and New Age spirituality, hypnotic sounds and colors in the peaceful utopia of pristine nature mystically transform artist Mori into Rave Goddess Mariko. 

The only real tension in these videos is between the entrancing eye-candy and Mori's own physical limitations. In the 3D video Nirvana, CG angels zip around playing traditional musical instruments while goddess Mori floats in flowing robes, sings, and twists her hands into a series of Buddhist mudras (sacred hand gestures). Without the lifelong training of a geisha or a kabuki actor, though, her ordinary awkwardness and weak voice reveal her not as otherworldly but merely human.

Mariko Mori, Dream Temple (CG Image),
1999, installation

Still, she perseveres in true bodhisattva spirit. Mori's major Gesamtkunstwerk attempts to holistically impart her spiritually unifying vision to viewers. The Dream Temple is a modern translation of the Yumedono, or "dream hall," at Horyu-ji Temple in Nara. The eight-sided structure shimmers—white columns raise the transparent, iridescent violet dichroic glass (the changing colors are close to the idea of consciousness, according to Mori) planes above a thick layer of salt on the floor. Visitors enter the spherical womb of the inner chamber one at a time, kneel on a pillow, don earphones and watch a computer-enhanced diagram of the origins of life—images of water, bubbles and biomorphic shapes—on a sensory enveloping convex screen for 4 minutes and 44 seconds. 

Why did Mori slip from a relatively complex and influential reflection of Japanese culture to a retrograde, albeit beautiful, Hollywood vision of the universe? Whatever the reason, this show is still worth seeing for the photographs and even for the sugar-high spectacle of the rest. 

This exhibition was held Jan-Mar 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MoT) in Kiba, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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