Mariko Mori

Mariko Mori was born on February 21, 1967, in Tokyo. She first trained in fashion, studying at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo from 1986 to 1988, before moving to London to study art at the Byam Shaw School of Art from 1988 to 1989 and then at Chelsea College of Art and Design, where she earned a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 1992. She moved to New York and completed the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program in 1993.

Mori's early work often placed her own image, styled as a futuristic or cyborg-like persona, into staged photographs and videos that drew on Japanese popular culture, science fiction, and Buddhist iconography. She returned to the Venice Biennale in 1997 with Nirvana, which received a Menzione d'onore (Honorable Mention). Her large-scale, technology-driven installation Wave UFO, developed between 1999 and 2002, toured internationally and was included in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2010 she founded the Faou Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit supporting public art projects tied to natural and geological sites. Her mid-career survey Oneness toured internationally from 2007 to 2011, including a widely attended presentation at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. She currently lives and works in New York, Tokyo, and Miyako Island, Japan, and the Mori Art Museum has announced a major retrospective, Mariko Mori: All That Shines, running from October 31, 2026, to March 28, 2027.

Mori has been consistently framed by museums and critics as a central figure in the intersection of contemporary art, technology, and spirituality, particularly within Japanese contemporary art of the 1990s and 2000s. Her Venice Biennale recognition in 1997, the international tour of Wave UFO, and the mid-career survey Oneness, which drew large audiences at its Rio de Janeiro venue, have anchored her institutional standing. Solo presentations at the Royal Academy of Arts (2012) and Japan Society (2013), together with the Mori Art Museum's 2026 to 2027 retrospective, indicate sustained institutional interest in her work decades into her career. No verbatim, attributable critical quotation meeting sourcing standards could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Mori's secondary market is thin relative to her museum profile. The highest price identified in available market databases is USD 156,250 for Cyclic II, cited by the auction-tracking database Art.Salon as occurring around March 2018; the specific auction house and exact sale date could not be independently confirmed from the sources available for this profile, so that detail should be treated with caution. Other recorded results for her work, at houses including Phillips and Heritage Auctions, have been substantially lower. She is currently represented by Sean Kelly (New York). No catalogue raisonne of her work has been identified.

Mori's market is defined less by auction turnover than by museum and institutional support: she holds work in major collections including MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou, and she is the subject of an upcoming Mori Art Museum retrospective. Her auction history is sparse and the highest reported price to date comes from a single market database rather than a fully corroborated primary sale record, so collectors should treat any single price point as provisional pending further verification. With no catalogue raisonne in place, provenance and gallery verification through Sean Kelly are the most reliable paths to authentication.