Episode 230: The Invisible World | Mariko Mori

What if the divisions we see in the world are not actually there?In this episode of About Art, Heidi Zuckerman speaks with artist Mariko Mori as part of a special six-part series presented in collaboration with the Aspen Art Fair.For more than three decades, Mori has created sculptures, installations, and immersive environments that bring together ideas we often consider separately: science and spirituality, technology and nature, the ancient and the future, the visible and the invisible.Mori traces this way of thinking back to her childhood in Japan, her father’s work as an inventor and engineer, the death of her father while she was an art student in London, and the questions about life, death, and existence that followed. She discusses Buddhism and Shintoism, prehistoric cultures, contemporary science, meditation, tea ceremony, nature, light, and her belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.At the center of the conversation is an idea of oneness. As Mori says, we create divisions between nations and cultures, between people, and between humanity and nature. But when we look at the Earth, those divisions disappear.Together, they consider art’s ability to make the invisible perceptible and to offer a different vision of the world—one in which connection, love, wonder, joy, and hope are forces with the potential to change how we see and how we live.“What we see is very little of what is as a whole.” — Mariko Mor