Mariko Mori builds her art around the biggest questions there are. Life, being, the cosmos — these are the subjects the artist returns to across her career, according to a new profile that traces her practice through five key works.

The Japanese artist has spent decades pondering what it means to be alive. The profile frames her output not as a sequence of stylistic shifts but as one sustained inquiry, with individual artworks serving as stations along the way. Each of the five works examined marks a distinct phase in that investigation.

Mori's preoccupation is explicitly cosmic. Her art asks questions about existence on the largest possible scale — questions about being alive that, as the profile puts it, she is "constantly pondering." That word, constantly, does a lot of work. It signals an artist for whom the question is never settled, never answered once and filed away, but reopened with each new project.

The five-work structure offers a useful lens on how such an inquiry evolves. Rather than cataloguing a complete retrospective, it selects artworks that emerged directly from Mori's questioning. The selection suggests an artist who treats each piece as a experiment in thinking — a way of testing an idea about life and the cosmos in material form.

What emerges from the profile's account is consistency of purpose. Mori does not move from theme to theme the way many contemporary artists do, chasing whatever the market or the moment rewards. She stays on her cosmic questions. The artworks change; the inquiry holds.

That persistence has defined her reputation. Mori is known as an artist of big, existential subjects, and the five works surveyed here show where that reputation comes from. Each piece carries the same underlying question — about being, about aliveness — into different territory.

For viewers, the invitation in the profile is straightforward: look at these five works not as separate objects but as one long conversation about existence. Mori's art rewards that kind of attention, because the questions she asks are the ones her audience is asking too, whether or not they put them into words.

The profile arrives as interest in Mori's practice continues, and its five-work walkthrough offers both newcomers and longtime followers a compact map of her career-long inquiry. Whether her cosmic questions will find resolution in future work is beside the point. For Mori, the pondering itself — constant, restless, renewed in each artwork — appears to be the practice.