As She Wishes

A beautiful, ethereal creature not quite of this world--that’s what artist Mariko Mori appears to be as she steps from behind an alcove in her eponymous exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Dressed in sleek, futuristic white garb with a small, sparkling silver pocketbook slung across her shoulder, she seems to have just descended from some unseen spaceship of her own design. The impression is borne out by traces of silver glitter on her face and a somewhat odd hairstyle that protrudes over her ears and lends her the look of a Japanese Princess Leia.

Though relatively tall for a Japanese woman at 5 foot 7, the 31-year-old former fashion model looks smaller because of her thin frame. This delicate exterior aside, Mori radiates an intense aura of power and mystery. Her brown eyes may not glow silver or gold as they do in several of her exhibition’s self-portraits, but they are full of the fierce fire of creative energy. Face to face, she is as charismatic as any of the magical personas she adopts for her multimedia installations.

Standing before the central image in her show, the 10-by-20-foot glass-encased photomontage “Pure Land,” which depicts the artist as a godlike figure surrounded by a ring of cyborg servants playing traditional Japanese musical instruments, she patiently describes the significance of the Buddhist symbolism pictured therein.

“This is Kichijoten,” she says, gesturing toward her elaborately costumed image. “It is one of the Buddhist figures. You can find it from the Heian Period to the Kamakura Period [where] there are these female figure statues which usually hold hoju in the left hand.” The hoju, Mori explains, is shaped like the bud of a lotus and serves as something like a magical crystal ball that makes wishes come true.

Mori’s hoju-holding Kichijoten hovers above the open petals of a large lotus flower, which blooms in the midst of a vast wasteland. “That’s describing--as I understand it--how you get enlightened,” Mori says of the flower. “When Buddha was working in mythology or stories, lotus flowers were blooming. But I just see it as a kind of symbol--the beautiful flower open in the mud. That’s a symbolic flower of the enlightenment stage.”

Mori’s choice of a Dead Sea backdrop for the work makes more sense once she points out the salt formations on the surface of the water. “Salt in Japanese culture is for purification,” she says. “I thought, it’s the lowest part of the earth--the Dead Sea--but it is also perhaps the purest part of the earth.”

Suddenly, Mori turns from her “Pure Land” image and half-runs, half-walks toward the dark, black-curtained room that contains her 3-D video “Nirvana” (also the title of the massive installation in which “Pure Land” plays a part).

“I want to show you,” she says to a visitor, gesturing to the rack of 3-D glasses while opening the curtain. “I will wait for you outside.” In the night-like interior of the chamber, the figures of “Pure Land” spring to life in a seven-minute show that reminds one of the Disney classic “Fantasia.” In the video, Mori soars through the air, throwing what seem to be flower petals into your face, as her cartoonish, multicolored musicians fly about on their bubbly, blue-green clouds. They play for Mori, as she sings in clear, high-pitched Japanese and performs ritual hand gestures known as mudra.

The effect of the video is dizzying. Mori explains that the inspiration for the imaginary little humanoids that soar about her during the video came from an early Buddhist temple in Nara, Japan, where “they have 51 different sculptures of all these ancient musicians--heavenly creatures--in the ceilings of the temple.” Mori thought the diminutive musicians, which she calls “tunes,” so cute that she wanted to have them as characters in her own work.

But how did Mori come to make a work of 3-D art that utilizes such advanced technology? “I had this idea for a while, and I was researching for a production company to make a 3-D video,” Mori responds. After inquiring with video game maker Sega, she was eventually introduced to Graphic Institute of Technology, which helped her to produce the complex work. Although the “Nirvana” video has yet to be seen in Japan, it was exhibited last year at the Venice Biennale.

It’s difficult to conceive of a more Japanese hybrid of past and present than Mori’s alternate universe, but Mori points out that she’s been more recognized in the U.S. and Europe than in Japan--most of her exhibitions have been in the West. And though she was raised in Tokyo and educated at the Bunka Fashion College there, she rejected the pampered, glamorous life of a fashion model and moved to London in 1988 to study, first at the Byam Shaw School of Art and later at the Chelsea College of Art. After school in London, she went to New York, where she entered the prestigious yearlong Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Currently she keeps two studios--one in Tokyo and one in New York.

“Because I travel a lot, I don’t feel like it’s necessary to have a home,” Mori says. “I feel like my home is actually in my work. For me, place is not the issue.” And though she makes liberal use of the symbols of Japanese Buddhism, she emphatically states that she is not proselytizing for that religion. “I think it’s a very important Eastern philosophy. But I’m not a Buddhist, and I’m not a monk. So, therefore, I don’t seek the same enlightenment that they are seeking. I’d like to be enlightened as a human being, to be more aware of certain things . . . but it’s a different motivation.”

Mori’s use of advanced technology to create works of extreme beauty and sublimity suggests a positive view of the power of science and technology to improve our lives and lead us toward higher states of being. But she cautions that much depends on how you use technology. She believes that only when awareness and consciousness are in a heightened dimension, can there be a balance between nature and culture, the materialistic and the spiritual.

“I completely believe that the development of science and technology will allow us to do even better. But perhaps our minds are not so aware--so awakened enough to use them in the right way.”

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“Mariko Mori: Contemporary Projects,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Aug. 10. Closed Wednesdays. Call (213) 857-6000.