'Mariko Mori anticipated the zeitgeist': curator Alexandra Munroe

The Mariko Mori retrospective at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum runs 31 October to 28 March 2027, co-curated by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's senior curator at large Alexandra Munroe and the Mori's director Mami Kataoka. In a new interview with The Art Newspaper, Munroe said the show is a deliberate attempt to revive international collaboration at a moment when, in her view, Japan has pulled back from its post-war internationalism.

"One motivation for doing the Mori show is to stimulate a revival in collaborations that can help bring the work done in Japan into international circulation," Munroe said.

How did the Guggenheim–Mori partnership come about?

Munroe's answer is short: "It's called synergy!" In the summer of 2024, both she and Kataoka had independently begun talking to Mariko Mori about staging a retrospective, and they combined forces. Munroe brought an interest in reappraising Mori within technology-based art; Kataoka brought a longstanding research focus on art that addresses spirituality in the modern era.

The collaboration grows directly out of Guggenheim programmes such as the Asian Art Initiative and the UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, Munroe said. Those initiatives have consistently partnered with museums, curators and artists across Asia to "collectively think through the larger argument of global art history" and map histories beyond the Eurocentric canon. She credits the Mori's "profoundly international outlook" as an equal factor.

Why Mori, and why now?

Munroe traces Mori's rise to meteoric stardom in the 1990s with Cyborg (1994-95), the first of her photomurals inserting herself as a cyborg — and later a Buddhist-inflected deity — into digitally rendered settings. That technological interest later took form in complex multisensory environments like Wave UFO (1999-2002), which Munroe describes as the first artwork to incorporate brainwave biofeedback.

"Technology is not an obstacle to humanism for her, but a means of envisioning a new kind of humanism that allows for higher states of consciousness," Munroe said. She also links Mori's engagement with pre-historic Japanese Jōmon culture, alternative belief systems and the afterlife to the work of Indigenous and First Nations artists who fold Indigenous knowledge into critiques of Western epistemes of modernity and linear time.

Has the world caught up with Mori?

Munroe's argument is that it has. She connects Mori's practice to the philosopher Yuk Hui, who advocates a holistic understanding of technology grounded in Eastern thought and cosmologies — what he calls "cosmotechnics" — rather than the split tradition of the modern West. Mori, Munroe said, "anticipated that zeitgeist" as a Japanese woman artist who researched Pure Land Buddhism and Jōmon cosmology alongside contemporary sciences of the mind.

Younger artists are following the same path. Munroe cites LuYang, a young Chinese artist and serious practitioner of Tantric Buddhism who uses game engines to illustrate transmigration of the soul, multiple selves and the world as an illusion. The Korean new media artist Ayoung Kim looks up to Mori, Munroe added, for drawing parallels between art and technology as ways to "recalibrate our reality", as Ayoung told her. Munroe expects an enthusiastic response from younger artists interested in storytelling and altered states of mind.

What changed in Japan's museum ecology?

Munroe has worked with Japanese institutions for three decades, going back to her landmark survey Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 1994. That museum opened in 1989, she notes, anticipating a 1990s boom in which municipalities and prefectures across Japan opened institutions in buildings by architects like Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki.

Despite precursors like the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura (1951) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1952), there was, she said, "remarkably little concerted historical understanding" of Modern and contemporary Japanese art and its place in global art history. Around the early 1990s, curators and scholars were still piecing together how that art evolved under post-war society — defeat, reconstruction, Americanisation — and through Japanese artists abroad like Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama and On Kawara. The new museums fueled the field's growth both in Japan and internationally.

She singles out the Mori's development into a global museum under Kataoka's leadership, praising the recent Sou Fujimoto exhibition as "one of the greatest architectural shows I've ever seen" and calling the Mori's solo shows of Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei and Lee Bul — going back 20 years — among the most influential staged anywhere for those artists. The gallery scene has transformed too, she said, with experimental galleries proliferating since 1994 and international galleries now representing Japanese artists and movements like Gutai, Mono-ha and Neo-Pop.

What lessons does Japan offer the world?

Munroe also credits Benesse Art Site Naoshima, built through the vision of patron Soichiro Fukutake, with Japan's emergence as a contemporary art superpower. Only a few hundred people attended the opening of Benesse House Museum in 1992; now the Setouchi Triennale draws millions to islands whose home population numbers a few thousand. Benesse's commissioning programme has given artists like Yukinori Yanagi, Rei Naito and Shinro Ohtake a platform for their most ambitious works.

Asked what other art scenes — facing austerity and withdrawing public support — can learn, Munroe points to Japan's public funding model, which she admires "and some envy". She praises regional collecting within an international context: the Nagoya City Art Museum's holdings of On Kawara, including rare early reportage pieces; the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History's "unparalleled" Gutai collection; and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum's mapping of Asian artistic exchanges under curators like Kuroda Raiji.

Her caveat is political: Japan has, in her view, retreated from its post-war identification as an international country. The Mori retrospective is her bid to reverse that drift — a test case for whether intensive co-productions, rare between Japanese and international institutions, can put Japanese work back into global circulation.