Then the video portion of Kumano finds Mori in a verdant futuristic fantasyland, beckoning to the viewer from dense fog and forest. Just as different forms of Buddhism are invoked in the exhibition, so are the artist’s past and future projects in her video. Cloaked in fox fur, white light and vibraphone tones, she radiates the otherworldly kitsch and fetishism, grace and posturing that her seminal Birth of A Star (1995) and Tea Ceremony (1994) made iconic. Dream Temple (1999), actually envisioned by Mori in the Western Japanese woods, appears in Kumano as a digitally treated apparition. Similarly, glimpses of the galaxy and planets flash in and out of Mori’s sparkling cyborg focus as the viewer is led to artificial nirvana.
     In Mori’s words: “On the surface [my art] appears high-tech, but looking into it one feels the genesis of traditional matters.” Even at her most scientific and experiential, in Tom Ha H-iu (2005-06) (interacting with the “Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment” to signal the birth and death of stars) and Wave UFO (2003) (a mock space ship and virtual reality for participants), for example, Mori is famous for probing elemental ideas, the diametric ideals dividing Mandala and Buddhism, East and West. But if these concerns are scarcely discernable in her vacant countenances of Empty Dream (1995) and Pure Land (1997-98), they resonate in her cibachrome skies, dichroic glass shrines, and biomorphic domes — seemingly contradictory renderings of an inchoate universe. However strange, Mori’s art lays the unorthodox mortar for her beautiful juxtaposition alongside floating extraterrestrials and Shintoist pantheons.