A flying car zooms between skyscrapers, passing a giant advertisement of a geisha swallowing a tablet. Beneath it, the rain-soaked streets look curiously low-tech: a noodle stall with a dragon-shaped neon sign; its elderly owner, who we hear speaking Japanese; a shop stacked with vintage televisions. This is Los Angeles in 2019, as dreamed up by Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner back in 1982.
Revisiting Mariko Mori’s early futuristic images reminds me of this scene. In Play with Me (1994), a blue-haired, armoured figure stands beside a video-game machine on a busy street in Japan; in Miko No Inori (1996), a white-haired figure turns a clear sphere over in her hands, standing in Kansai International Airport in Osaka. Dressed in an iridescent costume, white wig and blue contact lenses, she seems at home within the airport’s immaculate surfaces. Her slow handling of the sphere, however, gives this transit hub the stillness of a ritual space. Spiritual imagery and the tech-forward architecture of the airport conspire to promise access to another state of being.
These works feature in All That Shines at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, on show until March next year. Spanning more than 30 years, the exhibition is her first major retrospective in Japan since 2002. Mori used technology as a vehicle for transcendence, interconnectedness and spiritual renewal, projecting a version of the future that was technological but rich in substance. Revisiting her work raises questions about that promise. Is this version of the future still possible? How does it sit alongside the imagined futures of the artists who have followed her, in which we realise that bodies remain bound to work, technological control and the histories they carry?
