Mariko Mori, future present

In the 1990s, Mariko Mori often appeared in her works as a figure from an indefinite time. Sometimes an android, sometimes a futuristic priestess, sometimes a creature suspended between anime, manga, and digital cosmology. At a time when much of contemporary art looked to social realism or political critique, Mori instead constructed environments permeated by spirituality, science fiction, and technological imagination. The major retrospective organized by the Mori Art Museum traces over three decades of the Japanese artist's work, bringing together photographs, videos, sculptures, and immersive installations that have helped define one of the most recognizable practices in contemporary Asian art. Born in Tokyo in 1967, Mori emerged on the international scene in the 1990s with works that blended cyberpunk aesthetics, Japanese pop culture, and Eastern religious references. In works such as Play with Me and Tea Ceremony, the artist used her own body within contemporary urban environments, transforming herself into an alien presence immersed in the hyper-technological society of the post-bubble era in Japan. The exhibition traces the evolution of this research through the monumental installations of the 2000s and recent projects related to cosmology, meditation, and the relationship between humanity and the universe. Works such as Wave UFO, a large interactive environment based on visitors' brain activity, or Tom Na H-iu, an installation located in Iceland and inspired by cosmic geometries and ancient ritual sites, demonstrate the artist's progressive shift toward an increasingly spiritual and immersive dimension. An important part of the exhibition also focuses on Mori's relationship with technology. In her works, digital devices, virtual reality, sound, and light are not used as purely spectacular tools, but as means to produce perceptual experiences akin to contemplation or collective meditation. The artist has often described her work as an attempt to reconnect technology and spiritual consciousness, overcoming the traditional opposition between scientific progress and transcendence. In recent years, Mariko Mori's work has also been reinterpreted in light of contemporary transformations related to artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the growing fusion of the human body and digital systems. Many works created between the 1990s and 2000s appear surprisingly close to the aesthetics and questions of the present: virtual identity, avatars, artificial consciousness, and the digital construction of the self.