For almost a quarter of a century, Japanese audiences had to travel to see the full arc of one of their most internationally recognised artists. That changed on 31 October 2026, when “Mariko Mori: All That Shines” opened on the 53rd floor of Roppongi Hills Mori Tower. The Mori Art Museum calls it Japan’s first major Mariko Mori retrospective since “Pure Land” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2002.
Forty works, three decades
The show was organised together with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and is co-curated by Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim’s Senior Curator at Large for Global Arts, and Kataoka Mami, director of the Mori Art Museum. Around forty works trace Mori’s path through every medium she has used: performance-based and computer-generated photography and video, drawing, sculpture and large interactive installations.
Visitors meet the artist who became famous in the mid-1990s with her “Cyborg” photographs and sci-fi imagery, playing with anime culture, gender and post-human fantasy. From there, the exhibition follows her turn toward bigger questions shaped by Buddhist ideas of life, death and the cosmos, and toward the concept she calls “Oneness”, the interconnectedness of everything from deep geological time to the far edges of the universe.
Brainwaves, neutrinos and the winter sun
A highlight is Wave UFO (1999–2002), described by the museum as the first artwork ever to use brainwave bio-feedback. Places inside the pod are limited, so slots for the experience are rationed. Other works make cosmic events tangible: Tom Na H-iu (2006) turns neutrinos from supernova explosions into flashes of light, while the outdoor pieces Primal Rhythm: Sun Pillar and Ring: One with Nature are aligned with the sun at the winter solstice.
The Japanese title, 燦燦, points to the light that runs through her practice. The museum frames the show as a space for introspection, play and wonder in an age of technological acceleration and planetary precarity, which is a big promise, but one that Mori’s glowing, almost weightless installations are well suited to keep.
Good to know
The exhibition runs until 28 March 2027 and is open every day, normally from 10:00 to 22:00 (until 17:00 on Tuesdays). On opening night the museum stayed open until 6 a.m. for Roppongi Art Night. Running alongside it is the Mori Art Award 2026 Grand Prize exhibition of Katayama Mari, the award’s first Grand Prize winner, which is included in the same ticket.