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Mariko Mori's enchanting and colourful images creating a kind of paradise in which she has been showing herself, often in a Plexiglas capsule, are today much in demand on the art market. Emmanuel Perrotin, her dealer, who sold 60% of her works before these exhibitions were held, said a bank had bought one piece from Hong Kong. He added that her success proved that contemporary art was selling well.

Mariko Mori has not been used to producing many works yearly - not more than four- because she incurs heavy costs. Her installation exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 1997 was said to have cost $ 1 million while Christie's sold one of her works the following year for $ 100,000.

«Beginning of the End» necessitated many assistants and sponsors beside the fact that she needed to be aided by photographs.

Mariko Mori, who lives in New York, produces high-tech works which are prone to seduce rich dot.com entrepreneurs who make no difference between a drawing by Picasso, a video installation or a photographic work and buy pieces for their own pleasure. The virtual climate generated by the Internet has enabled the emergence of a new generation of artists, notably from Japan after that country was much marked by the scars of Hiroshima. That new generation has an optimistic vision of the world without feeling guilt or hostility. On the contrary it offers joyful visual works while Mariko Mori has found a way of mixing Zen mysticism with modern technologies.

Mariko Mori, now 33, is like Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun or Sophie Calle her own model after refusing to become a movie actress. She writes poems and is now a star of the art world. In «Beginning of the End», she shows herself in a transparent capsule placed before some of the most famous monuments of the world such as the pyramids in Egypt or Times Square in New York.

She said she wanted to reduce the gap between the West and the East, the present and the future adding that her performances were like peace missions at a time when our society made of giant cities has become a chaos orchestrated by new technologies. «In placing myself in a meditating position in a capsule, I am aiming at giving a certain conscience to the viewer. I am in fact trying to rediscover some harmony between the spirit and what is material",she pointed out.

Stressing that she believed in the power of art and artists, she explained that she was using new technologies much in order to create imaginary and virtual spaces. «I am not mad about the Internet though I think it is difficult to do without it. In fact, I am creating a new world and new realities... My last work is less virtual but laying down in a capsule, I am also expression an internal world", she said.

«It's quite difficult to find oneself in a culture dominated by the West. For the past ten years, I have shared my time between Tokyo and New York but my time is not linear like that of a watch but rather intertwined. I have lost contact with my culture and wherever I am I observe the world like an outsider. I have noted that Asian traditions have been disappearing as my generation is much marked by the Western world. Thus I feel the need to return to some traditional practice», she said.

Asked why she was posing as a model in her installations, she replied that she had been a fashion model at 16 and then a designer. «Posing as model was obvious in my mind and I consider my body as a tool to communicate with the world,» she summed up.
Mariko Mori said her photographs were costly because she needed to travel and work with as much as eight people notwithstanding the fact that she has to conceive her capsule and ship it to different parts of the planet.