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Pure Land, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, (January–March 2002), is Mariko Mori’s first large scale solo exhibit in Japan, although she has held numerous solo exhibitions in both private and public galleries in the United States and Europe. The return to her native country has been well received, with critics in the national newspapers praising her "universality" and then eagerly citing her brief stretch in modeling all in the same breathe. Yet the concept of performative fantasy, the acting out personas or roles constructed from underlying desires and imaginative compulsions—a concept central to the exhibit, has been largely neglected in discussions of Mori’s work. Pure Land explores the divergent ways this enactment creates meaning and power. While one photowork suggests that fantasy pervades and impels consumer desire, another simultaneously reveals how it propagates religious devotion. On whole, the collection expresses the ubiquity of imaginative role-playing, examining how it is employed in religion, sales and sex. The show opens a provocative dialogue about the relationship between fantasy, gender and consumer politics, but quickly allows the overriding sensation and ceremony of the exhibit to mute the debate. Pure Land induces the viewer to at first observe and consider the critical and irreverent actions portrayed in Mori’s work, and then to engage, as one navigates the museum, in a performance that seemingly contradicts the previously implied contentions regarding sexism and capitalism as they exist in Japan.
The exhibit is chronologically arranged beginning with the Empty Dream photographic series, which is followed by two video installations, the Nirvana photographic series and then finally the large-scale installations of Garden of Purification and Dream Temple. Visitors initially encounter large format colour photographs of Mori in various costumes; for example, she is an office worker serving tea, a business mascot greeting customers or a mermaid at an indoor beach. These playfully submissive female roles illustrate the element of fantasy that is prevalent in many cultural forms of Japan’s national imagination as well as its economic system. In Japan, animated or brightly-costumed women who deferentially serve consumers commonly appear on ATM screens, in shopping centres or on commercials selling everything from snacks to cell phones. Mori’s works question our indifference to these commonplace roles. Her art is closely tied to kosupure–a hobby fashionable among young women in Japan who clandestinely make and wear costumes often based on animé or manga (comic book) characters. In kosupure (from the English "costume play"), the sexually charged, fantastical models of the Japanese manga become life-sized. In Play With Me (1994) Mori is costumed in a blue sheath of plastic muscle. Her aggressively jutting breasts and exaggerated synthetic shoulders are juxtaposed against her long, blue pigtails and innocent, oblique expression. She is an intergalactic S&M schoolgirl, employed to ply cheap electronics to the indifferent consumers in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. The photograph does not seem incongruous with a certain conception of today’s Tokyo, revealing that the gendered language of consumer politics is a systemic and everyday occurrence. Despite this critique, the image maintains a certain appeal. The status of Japanese women as subordinate to both men and the capitalist system (the gaming centers, the love hotels, and the shopping centers that Mori showcases) is a central problem in the images; yet, a problem expressed in a medium that insists on attracting our own eye, thereby acceding our own complicity in the system.1
In Pure Land (1996–1998)—a photograph in the series and the namesake of the exhibit—Mori is modeled as Buddha, floating majestically over a translucent plastic lotus. A coterie of bubble-riding Martian musicians accompanies her. Wrapped in a lavish kimono and headdress, she holds her hand in the symbol for enlightenment. By clearly representing the mudras (hand symbols) and the lotus (a symbol of enlightenment in Pureland or Shin Buddhism), the artist ensures that her references to Japanese customs are recognizable despite the synthetic plasticity of the medium. Rather than mocking these customs, her stylized photoworks unite the graphic medium of animé with sanctified Japanese practices. Mori creates a ‘pop enlightenment’ that reveals the personal fantasies and desire within religious and otherworldly visions. The exhibit continually builds on the underlying theme of fantasy—despite the curator’s insistence on distinct ideas and motivations between the periods in Mori’s oeuvre. Pure Land links the performative aspects of kosupure2 and consumer drive with religious and cultural symbolism. Her choice of digital imagery, 3D effects, and brilliant colours to project venerated religious imagery allures rather than jars, synchronizing one’s desires into visual pleasure, conveying the underlying similarities of the genres of animé and ritual, porno and religion, all of which tactically operate in and through the realm of fantasy.
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Moriko Mori, Dream Temple, 1999
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Mori’s installations use space and vision to produce what she has called an "interactive"3 fantasy. Garden of Purification and Dream Temple (1999) are highly performative works that surround the viewer with surreal narratives, influenced by traces of Japanese cultural practices and mysticism. Gallery visitors must first traverse Garden of Purification if they are to see the Dream Temple. Garden occupies a large room, and can be accessed only from an entryway monitored by a gallery employee. Recalling kare sansui (dry landscape, or rock gardens), the garden installation consists of salt, resin, stone and crystal that has been carefully flattened and concentrically designed. Against the front wall is a photomontage of a misty forest with Mori as a pale spirit, walking away from a waterfall toward a digitized inset of the Dream Temple. Rows of ancient kanji (words written in Chinese characters) imbue the image with mythic and historical origins. The centre of the room is a pathway of lucent mauve stones, rubbery to the touch, and slightly wider than the average step. Gallery-goers cross the threshold and must carefully tread their way to the opposite side of the installation. Perhaps to prevent interference with the subjective experience of the artwork, guests are prohibited from entering simultaneously. This has two alternative consequences. For some, the allotment of time alone in the garden may be for individualized reflection as Mori has suggested; however, for most, the queue of people watching and waiting in the busy Tokyo gallery, combined with the challenge of striding the unevenly spaced stones, transforms the installation into a stage.
Now in a "purified" state, visitors proceed to the largest and most recent work of the exhibit. Dream Temple is an enormous octagonal structure made of iridescent glass and plastic which stands 5.2 meters high and is 11 meters in diameter. The technological complexity as well as the apparent material costs are testament to the financial power of the exhibit’s fashionable sponsors, including the Prada Foundation, Shiseido, Sony and other extremely profitable Japanese companies. This is a marked departure from the artist’s previous issues around consumerism. Instead, Mori proclaims to have created a utopian place, stating that visiting Dream Temple "should make one feel like they are taking part in a ceremony that takes them back to a state of mind before birth."4 After replacing one’s shoes with fitted white slippers, a gallery employee ushers each person to the front passage, where they must enter the temple’s core alone. Through the automatic glass entryway, a womb-like shell closes. Wearing headphones and sitting seiza (on the knees) for almost five minutes, the visitor watches a 3D projection on the curved screen while ambient music echoes through the headphones.
Dream Temple’s strategic placement within MOT allows visible access from every level of the gallery. All may gaze down at the structure, and most pause to do so. Significantly, the people entering and exiting the structure become key points of interest because only those who pay an additional fee and make a reservation may access the installation’s interior. Dream Temple is an elaborate stage for the visitor’s own performance. Yet, once again, this is not an individualistic improvisation. Like one’s experience in the Garden of Purification, enactment is controlled and staged by the artist’s script. Movement is directed and restricted by the guides, and the physical presence of the installations. The 3D screen, the soundtrack and complete enclosure manipulate one’s sensations. Rather than a journey of self-expression, visitors simply witness Mori’s creation. The structure, which was modeled after the Yumedono (Dream Hall) of Horyuji Temple in Nara, was designed to inspire an individual experience, to allow private viewing in an imaginative space free of the distractions of society. Conversely, the experience, to the limited few who have the opportunity to witness it, is highly regulated; moreover, rather than being (impossibly) free from societal issues, the work overlooks problematic issues of gender.
On leaving Dream Temple’s hub, the gallery guide bows deeply, and thanks each visitor for their effort; she then delivers each guest’s shoes and bows again. Her solemn manner, similar to that of the attendant at the Garden of Purification and many of the gallery’s other female employees, is suited to the ceremonious aspect of the artwork. Their presence facilitates public order and helps direct the visitor’s experience. One might be struck, however, by the similarities between the attendants and the subservient females portrayed in Mori’s earlier photoworks. Like the characters in Play with Me, the gallery employees are pleasing yet conveniently invisible, unselfconsciously servicing us, the gallery-going (and paying) public. Moreover, recalling the indifference of the photographed consumers from the Empty Dream series, the museum patrons take little notice. The subservience previously projected and interrogated in Mori’s photoworks was unquestioningly enacted, and the critique of the role of women in Japan offered in the Empty Dream series was, to my mind, compromised. Pure Land initially sparks questions about the nature and powers of fantasy, but ultimately seduces us into silence through the sensations of the installation. Solitarily confined to the projected daydreams of the womb-like structure, we are overwhelmed by pleasant smells, gentle music and random abstract imagery. At best, Mori’s gezamtkunstwerk succeeds about as well as an Orwellian feelie, offering us a playhouse of disquieting forfeit and a tempting state of (un)consciousness.
Moriko Mori
PURE LAND
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
January 19 through March 24, 2002
1 Reviewers have repeatedly revealed their own vulnerability to this attraction, by referring to Mori as a "seductive centrepiece" (Interview Magazine) or as a "captivating, unreal figure" (MCA Chicago).
2 It was interesting to note that all of the pieces had Katakana titles, the Japanese alphabet system that is reserved for foreign "loan" words.
3 Miyuki Kondo, "Artist Creates Reflective Shrine to Ancient and Modern Spirituality" Asahi Shimbun. (28 February 2002): 6.
4 Germano Celant "Eternal Present: Germano Celant vs Mariko Mori" Pure Land (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002): 115.
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