Mariko Mori
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead, UK
21 May – 14 September 2008

by Rea Cris

Japanese born, New York-based artist Mariko Mori is one of the Asian art world’s more mysterious and illusive artists. Her artwork is full of fantasy, simulacra and candy-coloured fabrications. Her chosen media are photography, video and installation. Japan, a society ruled by uniforms both in school and at work, is simultaneously a culture of “cos-play” where the weekend is a chance to liberate oneself and adopt and display any personality one chooses. Mori started out as a fashion model and her earlier photographic portraits are a mixture of extreme airbrush perfection and the bubble-gum pop of adolescent escapism. Within her self-portraits, she adopts different characters in the name of art. Mori doesn’t stop there; she is interested in the discovering the gates to this fantasy world and, of course, gaining access. Like a candy store window, technology promises to bring us closer to this world but never fully does, which is why Mori’s use of highly sophisticated technology as a medium is at the same time cynical but yielding.

The Baltic exhibit includes drawings from the “Primal Particles” and “Parallel Brane” series. The drawings gently vibrate, the shapes fragile and otherworldly. They are a species evolving, they are planets’ births and deaths, they are simply soap bubbles. Mori is a cosmonaut recording the new world for us to see. These drawings are a good prelude to the second part of the exhibition, which is the installation “Miracle”. Mori has jumped on the opportunity to use new developing technologies to create diachronic images in glass to make physical manifestations of her drawings. A line of circular mirror-like semi-hologramic images greet you. They resemble giant peep-holes or gigantic slides from a futuristic laboratory. As you look at each picture you are reflected back, a sickly hologram of pink and gasoline yellow. These images are alien yet cannot exist without and are created from you. The effect is disconcerting. You’re not quite sure where you stand, who you are meant to be and where. Mori gives false comfort in portraying a cutesy or “kawaii” exterior with her ready abundance of pink hues, but in reality, the questions she poses and the places she takes us are much farther than the Sanrio factory.

Tonya said:

I admittedly had to look up what "Parallel Brane" meant and damn, that's some hard-core serious string-theory shit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology