Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
mariko mori
mariko mori, onogoro stone I, 2023, dichroic coated layered acrylic, copyright mariko mori / adagp, paris,<br />2025, courtesy of the artist, photo nobutada omote
Japanese artist Mariko Mori first appeared on the cover of Purple Prose in summer 1995. Her early works featured herself as a sexualized, futuristic alien in everyday settings. Later, her sculptural pieces merged science, technology, light, and nature, reflecting a Zen-inspired spiritual vision.
“Through my personal experience, including meditation, I’ve had the chance to encounter a great light, which is invisible. It’s not the light that we can see with our eyes, but we can feel it. So, I try to understand how that experience can be interpreted. Buddhist ideas of enlightenment, reincarnation, or a deeper consciousness are very close to how I think that can be described. I feel that in prehistoric times, our remote ancestors had a more direct understanding of life and rebirth. But because we are in a society that does not allow us to activate our senses to understand life, death, rebirth, or even the meaning of our own lives, our senses are buried; our antennae are no longer functioning.”
