Mariko Mori
b. 1967, Tokyo, Japan
Miko no Inori, 1996
Digital video, color, sound
4:30 min.
Courtesy the artist

In her film Miko No Inori (The Shaman-Priestess Prayer), Mariko Mori appears as an extra-terrestrial shaman cyborg, adorned in a white, iridescent costume that mirrors her reflective ice-blue eyes, symbolizing a bridge between earthly existence and the spiritual cosmos. The film was shot in Japan’s then architecturally futuristic Kansai International Airport in 1996. The soundtrack features a spiritual chant translated as “The world is melting; the world is melting, becoming one...”

Mori's photography and performance work in the 1990s featured digital dreamscapes and Buddhist iconography rendered in mystical and techno-optimist gloss. Her art, which attends to how ethno-geographical formulations of Asia interface with technology, gender, and cosmology, contributes to the complex discourses on Asian futurism and Asiatic femininity.