![]() A crystal ball, much like the one featured in previous works, floats out of the sky and into the Shaman’s delicate hands. ![]() Mariko hums and sings Japanese pop songs through a fuzzy echo chamber and the audience is treated to burst of cool, scented air on their faces. The Shaman is surrounded by pastel coloured elves called tunes, which each play a different Japanese musical instrument. The artist appears as a dancing Shaman dressed in a traditional ornate kimono and floating on a lotus flower. In order to participate in the aptly named experience, Nirvana, the viewer is led in to a dark room and asked to don 3D glasses before the film begins. Pure Land, from the Esoteric Cosmos series (1996–1997) She executes a sequence of ritual gestures, accompanied by a band of cartoon musicians who zoom out toward the viewer before the whole scene dissolves into galactic mist. Mori appears as the popular deity Kichijoten, in a peach-colored kimono and floating over a Dead Sea landscape tinted an acidic orange-pink. The title refers to the blissful emptiness that is the goal of Buddhist spiritual practice - Ms. The crystal ball also alludes to the 1980 novel Nantonaku Kurisutoru (Somehow, Crystal), by Yasuo Tanaka that describes the lives of fashion obsessed young women much like the young ‘cyborgs’ who patrol the streets of the Yamanote district in Tokyo. They hold a glass sphere in their hands, much like a crystal ball used by mystics for telling the future – perhaps they have come to show us our destiny. There’s an iconic cast to this triad: the figures suggest Buddhist Barbarellas. Mariko assumes the same persona but is shown full length and in triplicate, enshrined inside a fabulous spaceship (actually a digitally morphed image of Osaka’s hypermodern Kansai airport). Watch an excerpt of the video Last Departure (1996) All the while, Mariko voice can be heard singing an evocative ballad in her native tongue. Outfitted entirely in white, the artist takes on the role of ‘alien’ (much like the being depicted in Last Departure) erotically caressing a crystal ball in her hands. With silver hair and menthol-blue eyes, she rotates and massages a glass globe in her hands as if conjuring the future. In the video, which plays simultaneously on five small screens, Mori looks coquettishly extraterrestrial. Miko no Inori / The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer (1996) ‘Birth of a Star”, named for a television talent show, she is the demonic punk incarnation of the look-alike, sound-alike ingenue singers who are Japan’s premier teeny-bop idols. Hybrid creature, hybrid world made for each other. Posing among happy Japanese bathers, Mori is costumed as a coy mermaid. Mori digitally inserts herself four times into a photograph of Ocean Dome – the largest indoor theme park in the world, including an artificial beach, waves and all. Her ”office lady” uniform is regulation black, but her tight-fitting silver cap has pointy Martian ears. In this piece Mariko is an interplanetary geisha, dispensing tea to businessmen. She looks like a cross between a samurai waif and a robotic streetwalker who may have materialized from the video game beside her. Mariko stands outside a busy Tokyo video store, dressed in form-fitting plastic armor and a cascading turquoise Barbie wig. Hers is a world where cartoon characters step out of comic books to stalk the real streets and real people withdraw from their grim routine to lose themselves in cartoon fantasies. With an affectionate perspective on her native country, she explores the way fantasy and reality overlap in contemporary Japanese consciousness. Mori is fascinated by the way contemporary Japanese society balances technology, fantasy, and humanity. Her work also touches on a number of subjects like adolescent fantasy, narcissism, pop culture, religion & fashion. Moriko Mori has long made art characterized by a sci-fi sensibility that seems ineluctably linked to the city and the future. The Japanese-born artist Mariko Mori, creates work featuring cybergeishas and other Manga-influenced characters.
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