Guggenheim and Mori Art Museum Join Forces for Mariko Mori Retrospective

By Daniel Okafor

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo has opened a Mariko Mori retrospective, All That Shines, running 31 October through 28 March 2027 — a co-production between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Japan's most internationally watched museum. Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim's senior curator at large, is co-curating with Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka. It is the kind of intensive collaboration between a Japanese institution and a foreign one that, Munroe admits, remains rare.

How did the collaboration come about?

"It's called synergy," Munroe said. In the summer of 2024, both she and Kataoka had independently begun talking to Mori about staging a retrospective, so they combined forces. Touring shows between Japanese and international museums are common; genuine co-productions, where two institutions build an exhibition together from the ground up, are not. Munroe frames this one as a direct outcome of Guggenheim programmes like the Asian Art Initiative and the UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, which have consistently partnered with museums and curators across Asia — and, equally, of what she calls the Mori's "profoundly international outlook."

There is a stated motive beyond the art. Munroe is blunt about the context: "In recent years Japan has retreated from its post-war identification as an international country." One motivation for the show, she said, is to stimulate a revival of collaborations that bring work done in Japan back into international circulation. A promise of cultural exchange, then, riding on one exhibition. Whether one retrospective can carry that weight is a fair question the curator leaves unanswered.

Why Mori, and why now?

Mori rose to meteoric stardom in the 1990s with Cyborg (1994-95), the first in a series of photomurals in which she inserted herself as a cyborg — later as a Buddhist-inflected deity — into digitally rendered settings. That technological interest later produced complex multisensory environments such as Wave UFO (1999-2002), which Munroe identifies as the first artwork to incorporate brainwave biofeedback.

Munroe's reappraisal rests on a specific argument: for Mori, technology is not an obstacle to humanism but "a means of envisioning a new kind of humanism that allows for higher states of consciousness." Strong claim. The evidence she marshals is Mori's deep research into Pure Land Buddhism, Jōmon cosmology and contemporary sciences of the mind — work that, in Munroe's reading, anticipated the philosopher Yuk Hui's calls for "cosmotechnics," a holistic understanding of technology grounded in Eastern thought rather than split off in modern Western traditions. "Mariko anticipated that zeitgeist," Munroe said, as a Japanese woman artist conducting that research decades before it became fashionable.

She also links Mori's engagement with prehistoric Jōmon culture, alternative belief systems and the afterlife to Indigenous and First Nations artists who fold Indigenous knowledge into critiques of Western epistemes of modernity and linear time. Kataoka, for her part, brings a longstanding interest in art addressing spirituality in the modern era — an interest that doubles as a critique of contemporary art's dominant trends as set by market forces and Western institutions.

Who else is catching up to her?

Munroe names heirs rather than claiming influence in the abstract. The Chinese artist LuYang, a serious practitioner of Tantric Buddhism, uses game engines to illustrate the transmigration of the soul, multiple selves and the world as illusion. The Korean new media artist Ayoung Kim, she notes, looks up to Mori for unabashedly treating art and technology as ways to "recalibrate our reality," as Ayoung told her. Munroe predicts an enthusiastic response from younger artists interested in storytelling and altered states of mind — anyone, in her phrase, looking to get away to another world.

What has changed in Japan's museum ecology?

Munroe speaks with three decades of authority in the country, going back to her landmark survey Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 1994. Her account of change is sweeping but specific:

• The 1990s museum boom saw municipalities and prefectures open institutions in extraordinary buildings by architects such as Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki.
• Before that, despite precursors like the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura (1951) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1952), there was remarkably little concerted historical understanding of modern and contemporary Japanese art's role in global art history.
• Curators in the early 1990s were still piecing together how the field evolved under post-war conditions — defeat, reconstruction, Americanisation — and through artists abroad like Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama and On Kawara.
• Experimental galleries have proliferated since 1994, alongside international galleries representing movements like Gutai, Mono-ha and Neo-Pop.

She singles out the Mori Art Museum's development into a global museum under Kataoka, praising its recent Sou Fujimoto exhibition as one of the greatest architectural shows she has ever seen, and its solo shows of Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei and Lee Bul — going back 20 years — as among the most influential staged anywhere for those artists. High praise from a curator with her vantage point; also praise from a partner with a show to sell.

What lessons does Japan offer?

On Benesse Art Site Naoshima, founded through the vision of patron Soichiro Fukutake, Munroe notes that only a few hundred people attended the opening of Benesse House Museum in 1992 — while the Setouchi Triennale now draws millions to islands whose home population is a few thousand. Benesse's commissioning programme, she adds, gave artists like Yukinori Yanagi, Rei Naito and Shinro Ohtake platforms for their most ambitious works.

Her admiration for Japan's public funding of museums comes with a note of envy, given austerity and withdrawing public support for art elsewhere. She points to regional collections tied to artists' origins: Nagoya City Art Museum's extraordinary On Kawara holdings, including rare early reportage pieces, despite his leaving the region in his teens; the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History's world-unparalleled Gutai collection; and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum's mapping of Asian artistic exchange under curators like Kuroda Raiji.

Whether All That Shines truly revives Japan's international collaborations, or stands as a welcome exception, will only become clear in the seasons after it closes in March 2027.