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Mariko's Dream Artist of the moment, Mariko Mori fuses ancient and contemporary Japanese culture in works that are utterly cosmopolitan. By Margaret Guyader Photographs courtesy of Deitch Projects The current fascination with all things Zen in this country seems somehow at odds with what is actually going on in Japan. Young women with raucous platinum hair, brilliant blue eye shadow, and inches-high platform heels are drawing stark contrasts with the previously prevailing image of the submissive Asian woman. Japanese artist Mariko Mori uses this fascination with the unreal, the fantastic, the futuristic in her photographs, videos, and installations. Fellow artist Kunie Sugiura said in a 1998 Journal of Contemporary Art interview with Mori, "It is also surprising to me that your photographs are about teenage–not adult–fantasies." Mori’s justification: Older generations tried to copy Western culture, but the youth are original and powerful. And they’re challenging the stereotypes that have long been associated with Japanese culture. The 33-year-old former model casts herself in visual narratives that depict goddesses, geishas, and other traditionally female figures who convey an aura of mystery, with a touch of mayhem. With wacky costumes--designed by the artist-- surreal makeup, and artful acting, Mori creates works that might appeal to the Britney Spears crowd but actually reach the most thoughtful critics in contemporary art today. She has a fan club whose devotion borders on the bizarre. But Mori is a celebrity. Unlike artists whose success seems incumbent on their degree of suffering and anonymity, Mori is adored by curators and consumer culture alike. She has exhibited her work at the Centre Georges Pompidou in France, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, among many others. She was on the March 2000 cover of ARTnews. Her works command as much as $100,000, and her installations cost millions to execute. Her popularity among the masses is no mystery. In a pop culture/kitsch way, they are beautiful; she is beautiful. But her art is also layered with complexities not immediately visible in the imagery found in each work. Dream Temple, an architectural construction of dichroic glass completed in 1998 that was inspired by an actual Buddhist temple in Japan, is intended as a vessel for meditation. Visitors are invited to meditate, to search for nirvana or some perfect state that is achieved through intangible means. Earlier works like the video Kumano integrate ancient Buddhist elements with contemporary and futuristic icons. Others, like Tea Ceremony, depict a traditional Japanese ritual, where a female office worker serves tea to a male office worker. The scene captures the incongruity in today’s society. Mori said in her interview with Sugiura, "Girls and employees both start from resignation (" not humbleness but abandonment... Girls are actually career women who are super women who must work harder than men and also take care of husbands and do all the housework. Those societal strictures have kept Mori from living in Japan full time. She left her country to study at the Chelsea College of Art and has lived in New York for the last 10 years. Now she divides the time between her homeland and her adopted home, gaining perspective and distance from the two. So she sees the best of both worlds and comments on them in her art. Her work cannot be segmented into a description like "feminist art" or cultural commentary. It is based on the philosophical evolution of society, both Eastern and Western, and her relationship with current culture. Mori said in a 1999 interview with Germano Celant: "I am interested in circulating past iconography in the present in order to get to the future." If Mori’s success is any indication, the future is now. |