Mariko Mori
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Japanese multimedia artist. Born in Tokyo, she works there and in New York. She studied design and worked part time as a fashion model but decided that this was insufficiently creative and began staging tableaux in which she posed in costumes and settings of her own design. She draws on the mixing of Western and national sources which form Japanese mass culture. Birth of a Star (1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) is a life-size transparency of Mori in plasticized tartan micro-skirt with outsize headphones, spiky hair, and silver contact lenses. The critic Rachel Schreiber was reminded of the cyborg, defined by the cultural theorist Donna Haraway as ‘a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’. She also draws on and updates the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. In Tea Ceremony II (1995) she is dressed in an outfit with silver stockings and outsize ears, making her appear half alien. She stands on the outside of an office block offering the tea to business men who pass by indifferently. Is Japanese tradition now so strange in the contemporary world that it might have come from another planet? Kay Itoi who interviewed the artist in her studio describes her enactment of the tea ceremony as ‘an impressive piece of performance art’. What is peculiar to her work is not simply the flavour of an exotic culture but the way that her interest in fashion and technology is combined with a Buddhist perspective. For an exhibition in 1998 she provided a statement which referred very specifically to ‘The chain of reincarnation [which] harks back in time forever’. Tea Ceremony has been interpreted as a representation of the Buddhist mappo, which is a period of decline before the arrival of the future Buddha. Much more specific is the spectacular video installation Nirvana (1996–7), which moves on from the social criticism of her earlier work. Mori rises from a lotus flower and floats like a goddess above a tranquil beach (it takes 3D to a level of poetry quite beyond anything so far achieved by the commercial cinema), yet the plastic props are obviously the product of contemporary popular taste and mass production. She writes: ‘Let our spirit be liberated. Let us be at one with the ultimate truth of our selves and the whole universe.’ The implications of Mori's work are that contemporary technology need not necessarily be a hindrance to that process.
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Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori (森 万里子, Mori Mariko, born 1967 in Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese video and photographic artist. While studying at Bunka Fashion College, she worked as a fashion model in the late 1980s. This strongly influenced her early works, such as Play with Me, in which she takes control of her role in the image, becoming an exotic, alien creature in everyday scenes. In 1989, she moved to London to study at the Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Exhibitions and works
The juxtaposition of Eastern mythology with Western culture is a common theme in Mori's works, often through layering photography and digital imaging, such as in her 1995 installation Birth of a Star. Later works, such as Nirvana show her as a goddess, transcending her early roles via technology and image, and abandoning realistic urban scenes for more alien landscapes.
Play With Me (1994): Standing outside a Tokyo toy store, Mori dressed herself as a sexy cyborg—with light blue hair in long ponytails, metallic blue plastic in a hard-shell articulation of erotic body parts, silver plastic gloves, and a dress. Mori was trying to show that she connects to the robotic toys inside the store, but also to show her available unemotional sexuality.[1]
Subway (1994): Mori stood in a Tokyo subway car dressed as if she just landed from outer space. She was dressed in a silver metallic costume with a headset, microphone, and push-buttons on her forearm. This transformation—along with Play With Me—was to explore different constructed identities.[1]
Empty Dream (1995): Mori manipulates a photo of a real public swimming place as she inserts herself in a blue plastic mermaid costume in several locations within the scene. This image refers to, among other things, the rising of technology and philosophy around the creation of man through biotechnology.[1]
Oneness (2002): Oneness presents the dimensions of spirituality, photografy and fashion into a deep look on the originality of the artist's skill hence the usage of technology's brand new trends. The outlook designs of Oneness gathers the capacity nevertheless the hability to use advanced technology knowledge converted to some sort of mystic and UFO's.[2]
Including in Oneness you can find some sub-works such as the Wave-UFO, a 6.000 kg dome where the visitor, once inside it, can see projected paintings reworked with computer graphics and then transformed into photographs in the interior dome of the Wave UFO.[2]
Notes
- ^ a b c Fineberg, Jonathan (2000) (paperback). Art Since 1940. Strategies of Being (Second ed.). Upper Saddle, New Jersey: Prentice Hill Publishers. pp. 494–5. ISBN 0-13-183978-0.
- ^ a b Deitch Projects [1]
External links
- Mariko Mori at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin [2]
- Mori's Birth of a Star at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
- Exclusive Mariko Mori video
- Her sculpture Tom Na H-iu, driven by the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory
- Mori's "Wave UFO"
- Mori interview at the Journal of Contemporary Art
- Mariko Mori at Brooklyn Museum of Art: Review of exhibition Empty Dream, Asian Art News, November 1999
- Shibuya River Mori Profile with links
- Tea With Mariko at artnet.com
- Mariko Mori compared to Salvador Dali
- Mori profile at deitch.com
- Oneness exhibition at deitch.com
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Oxford Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art
A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. © 1998
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