MARIKO MORI

Artist ISSUE 2 2024 AW

The art of Mariko Mori, the inimitable and iconic conceptual artist, is at once thoroughly modern and unmoored from time, reaching far into the past and projecting deep into the future. From the intense quietude of Yuputira, her pristine, cocoon-like residence on the remote Okinawan island of Miyakojima, Mori provided a peek into her practice. With a typhoon raging outside, she prepared traditional tea in her chashitsu, shared a series of fantastical drawings in her studio, and explained the obsession that lies deep within her heart and her art: capturing the energy of the benevolent force that links the entirety of humanity and the universe.

Yuputira, conceptual artist Mariko Mori’s otherworldly residence-cum-atelier on the far flung Okinawan island of Miyakojima, is immediately memorable for a couple of reasons. First is something it has: its silhouette, stupendously curved, like an intergalactic igloo or the enormous skull of a mythical sea creature. When approached from the main road, cutting through the tall reeds of the surrounding sugar cane fields, the house emerges into view like a crash-landed alien spacecraft. But Mori’s design inspiration was decidedly more earthbound and local: the bleached, round coral stones that pepper the nearby beaches. It’s also meant to place her in nature while protecting her, like a cocoon or prehistoric cave, from the sometimes harsh Okinawa weather that’s visibly wearing on the building’s white exterior. 

Second is something it doesn’t have: an obvious way in. After arriving at the foot of the house, which is raised intimidatingly on a white platform flanked by enormous stone retaining walls, you are faced with a garage and a blank utility door. An opening to your left reveals a steep switchback staircase. You ascend carefully–and if it is raining, which it often is, extra carefully–as it rises precariously into the open air. At the top you step onto a wide terrace, which wraps around the entirety of the building, keeping an eye on each step as the drama unfolds around you. There, recessed in a soft archway, you find another door. Also unmarked save for two small, dichroic portholes near its upper hinge, it whispers, but does not scream, front door.

The door softly opened, and that’s where we were greeted by Mori, smiling demurely in a flowing white dress. Somehow at once both intensely enigmatic and warmly disarming, she placed down pairs of white slide sandals in the entryway for each of us and welcomed us into her home. 

Completed in 2022, Yuputira–named after a local Okinawan god–required five years of special engineering, first to find a stable foundation deep beneath the coral-filled soil and then to realize its curved form. A sole artisan labored alone for three months to finish the outer shell. “This place was my dream for 15 years,” Mori said, “and I was able to execute it. I feel quite proud of this house. I love every corner.” She added with a warm laugh, “I never want to leave!” 

This sort of obsessive, years’ long pursuit of her grandly ambitious visions has become something of a calling card for Mori. Her work  can sometimes take a decade or more to realize, and require her to play conductor to makeshift, global teams of fabricators, structural engineers, and quantum physicists. It’s a process that, on its face, would seem to demand tremendous control and judgment. But Mori has learned to let go, in life and in art. 

“I have adopted a guiding principle for myself: I refrain from judging whether the events that happen to me are good or bad,” she explains. She refers to the ancient Chinese proverb saiou ga uma, which teaches that events and their consequences are unpredictable. “I accept what happens without hastily labeling it as positive or negative, embracing each experience as it unfolds.” 

As with so much of her work, which often invites adjectives like “alien,” “surreal,” and “mystical,” what unfolded at Yuputira is mindblowing. Mundane details become extraordinary. I gasped at a bathtub. I marveled at door knobs. I stared, rapt, at a skylight. Her first architecture project, the house pulsates with the greatest hits of Mori’s distinctive visual vocabulary: arching lines and iridescent surfaces. An acrylic step that approximates a giant raindrop hitting the ground. Milky lilypad stairs, reminiscent of her 2003 Wave UFO installation, that float in a soft, transcendental spiral up toward the sunlight. An overwhelming, immaculately white expanse that stirs uncommon paranoia: Is that my hair on the floor? Should I have brought new socks? Why did I wear orange shorts?

With the waves silently breaking on the rocks outside, it was also a concentrated collision of the intertwined fascinations Mori perpetually explores in her art: circular connection, old tradition and new technology, earthly existence and universal transcendence, human connection and our relationship to nature. All in a package worlds away from the demands of her bustling art career in Tokyo, New York and London.

“One of the reasons I find this place very meaningful is that you have a feeling of being one with nature, but by doing so, you are actually confronting yourself. I believe your true self appears when you stand in front of nature. You can really go deeper into your consciousness,” she explained. “It’s very grounding, and it’s very rare to get that in everyday life in a city.”  “You are here alone,” she continued. “The purpose is to be alone here.” It’s why she comes to Yuputira whenever she can find a few days to make the trip. Here, Mori has the space and time to practice traditional disciplines that have become foundational life pursuits. She meditates almost daily (during off days, she makes sure to note, she substitutes a contemplative walk in nature). At a small desk on the second floor, in an alcove off of her massive studio, she does shodo, traditional Japanese calligraphy, because the sunlight hits the ink perfectly there through a single, egg-shaped window. 

She served us tea in her minimalist chashitsu on the first floor, decorated only by simple tea equipment and a single white flower in the tokonoma behind us. Mori, holding a small tray, entered through the room’s clear door with careful choreography–first tugging at its single, simple carved hole to inch it ajar, and then each hand gently pushing it fully open in equally measured turns. Kneeling on the tatami, she placed a warmly iridescent square plate holding a ribbon of wagashi, curled like an inchworm, precisely before each of us. After a quick smile, she quietly retreated and closed the door behind her in a perfectly parallel reversal of her entrance. Shortly later, she returned again, this time to deliver frothy matcha in pearlescent chawan.

Mori has had a lifelong relationship with sado, the Japanese tea ceremony. Her grandmother was a tea instructor, so she was steeped in its traditions from age three and began practicing seriously at 30.

When she burst onto the art scene in 1994, it was partly through a photo series she named Tea Ceremony: a statement on gender roles featuring Mori dressed as an alien office lady serving tea to salarymen in Japan. Sitting with her, I ask what these traditional practices mean to her and her art. “Having this cultural foundation forms the backbone of the concepts I develop,” she said. In her mapping of existence, she sees humankind using technology to make life easier in our communion with nature. But humans need guidance in using technology to shape their future. Tradition provides that. “Tradition is the fundamental basis that gives you guidance about which direction we should go in–will this destroy nature? Is this the right direction? There is wisdom embedded in tradition.” 

I ask her if religion plays a similar role. “It can, sort of–our morals are based on religion–but sometimes the rules don’t function in our new life or a new vision of the world. They need to be modified or adjusted. We are trying to be more free, more equal, more connected, and achieving oneness. If you want to do that, the old rules may not apply anymore. We need to make new rules for new morals.”

Fittingly, a searching, interdimensional spirituality tends to vibrate across all of Mori’s work. Really, she’s been trying to answer the big, existential questions for most of her life. At age nine, curiosity about God led her to attend weekly Christian church services. At 23, her father’s premature passing inspired deep research on Zen Buddhism and Esoteric Buddhism. But her research could only take her so far. “It was my brain trying to understand it. Your brain is functional, like a stomach or lung. It’s not your spirit or your soul or your heart.” 

In 2016, while deep in meditation, her heart finally found her answer. “I had a spiritual experience. I encountered a Great Light,” Mori recounts. “I felt it was the source of all creation, for all living beings and all physical material. We all came from this Great Light. Not only this world, but different dimensions, including this universe and across the multiverse. It is not limited by time or space, and it is full of enormous love and compassion.” 

It was not Mori’s first encounter with the Light–that was in 1998, when she was visited by a less direct vision that nevertheless so moved her that she has exclusively worn white every day since in aspirational tribute (during our visit, she was offered a gray bathrobe to wear while prepping to shoot photos; she politely declined).

Remarkably, her 2016 vision left an even more profound impact. Mori analogized it, in turn, to the feeling of a first love, or witnessing the beauty of wild nature, or the love a mother has for her child, only unfathomably grander in scope. The emotion was so great, she said, she couldn’t stop crying. The experience was life-changing. And art-changing. “This message I received, it’s always in my mind. I never want to forget it. I always try to remind myself of it,” she says.

“I believe I can sense the profound energy of the Light and that I convey it through my work to bring it to the world. Because of that, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for being able to live as an artist, and I consider it to be one of my most essential purpose as an artist. I commit myself to it wholeheartedly each and every day.” 

During our visit, that energy was particularly fresh; for the first time in eight years, she had encountered the Great Light once more. “I thought maybe I was too obsessed with wanting to experience it again so I couldn’t experience it again. But then, last week,” Mori paused, her eyes lighting up with delight. “Last week it happened again!” 

Upstairs in her expansive atelier, Mori shared a series of 27 large drawings, spread in neat rows on the floor, that she had been devotedly working on. The drawings all abstractly depicted the Great Light as a portal emanating rings of warmly electric color and celestial photons, each only subtly different from the next. Taking one in hand, Mori sat down at her desk with a set of pastels. Despite the typhoon outside, she asked to have the opposite wall, a series of floor-to-ceiling glass doors that look out dramatically over the expanse of the sea, fully slid open. Wind and rain whipped through the cavernous opening into the studio. I held my breath, certain her drawings would be blown around the room; amazingly, they lay unbothered. Mori was unbothered, too, there in a space of her own obsessive invention, sharing a moment of silent communion between her devotional art and wild nature.

 Later, I asked if she felt differently about her earlier artwork, before she learned to let go, before she had unlocked her understanding of existence. “I feel like I’m an older sister, and I feel like my younger sister made that work. That doesn’t mean it’s better now; at the time perhaps your motivation could be more pure. There was no business involved then. So you’re really so free. Your spirit is free. Perhaps, that could be the best artwork ever made. You never know. ”

Mori continued, “But, in the beginning, I really couldn’t compromise. I was really stubborn. I was trying so hard to control everything that I missed all this beautiful opportunity for the real gift: unexpected things. As soon as I started to open my mind to accepting that, my work became more joyful. And maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it actually has become more magical. I didn’t know it when I was young, but I’ve come to see it over time by experiencing this thing that’s almost a miracle to me: The artwork has surprised me. “And that’s better,” she said with a quiet smile. “Much better.”