Mariko Mori has developed one of the most distinctive art practices, probing the entanglements of technology, spirituality, and human subjectivity through photography, sculptures, videos, and large-scale public installations. Emerging in the mid-1990s amid Japan’s post-bubble era, her early self-portraits, such as Play with Me and Subway (both 1994), deploy cosplay and cyborg imagery to dissect gendered stereotypes, consumerism, and the mediated construction of identity. Her breakthrough works—Nirvana (1996–97) and Empty Dream (1995), shown in the Nordic and Japanese pavilions at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997—fuse anime futurism with Buddhist visual language, cementing her signature exploration of posthuman existence. Effervescent and prophetic, her oeuvre presents visions of harmony between us, nature, and the universe in an ever-evolving digital age. In our forthcoming Nov/Dec issue, we sit down with this defining voice on the eve of her major retrospective, “All That Shines,” co-curated by Mami Kataoka and Alexandra Munroe at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.

Elaine W. Ng is editor and publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.