EXPERIENCING `NIRVANA'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

She could be a refugee from a '50s sci-fi serial, or the high priestess of some exotic cyber-based religion.

Extending a tentative hand in greeting, artist Mariko Mori is swathed in space-age fibers: a gleaming white dress so slick it looks waterproof, accented by a silver pocketbook and the kind of footgear Jane Fonda might have favored in ``Barbarella.''

If Mori and her work represent the shape of things to come, then this summer the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be the cultural equivalent of a Silicon Valley research lab.

Rather than seeing technology as art's implacable foe, Mori regards it as a potential ally in the quest for spiritual equilibrium. Not unlike her attire, her art is all about distilling harmony from opposites: nature and technology, East and West, fantasy and reality, ancient Buddhist spirituality and 21st-century materialism.

Mori explores those themes in ``Contemporary Projects: Mariko Mori,'' a large-scale multimedia installation consisting of four billboard-sized photomurals, a 3-D video and a lotus-shaped acrylic sculpture (collectively titled ``Nirvana''), and an earlier video accompanied by a series of photo stills.

``Nirvana's'' predominant images are of uncanny landscapes, filled with computer-generated cartoon sprites, mysterious globules and levitating dieties portrayed by Mori herself. Serving in effect as her own producer, director, costume designer, cinematographer, location scout and star, Mori constructs hallucinatory environments that she thinks of not as whimsical playlands, but as gateways to new, futuristic realms of perception.

``Virtual reality will actually help us to create new space. I think it will actually help us with our consciousness,'' says Mori, 31, her words edged with a faint British accent.

``I think next century's technology will have a balance between materialism and technology and nature and culture. We have to rethink traditional Eastern philosophy of Buddhism, Taoism, which talks a lot about balance.''

Technical creativity

Balance appears to be central to Mori's personality as well as her art, which first caught the world's attention at last year's Venice Biennale.

Formal yet forthright, she steers a visitor through LACMA's galleries with the purposeful politeness of a tea-ceremony hostess, quietly explaining the intricate Buddhist symbolism that underlies much of her work.

First stop is a darkened gallery where the seven-minute 3-D video ``Nirvana'' is being shown. In it, a brilliantly costumed Mori, impersonating the traditional Japanese goddess Kichijoten, floats out from the screen surrounded by tiny Claymation spirits resembling Asian Teletubbies, which Mori calls ``tunes.''

Each ``tune'' plays a traditional Japanese instrument as it floats by on a frothy blue cloud. Simultaneously, Mori's 3-D image begins to sing and perform a dance combined with hand positions known as mudra, used in Buddhist art to signify particular mental states. Though the words sound like ancient incantations, Mori later confesses with a giggle that they're actually snippets of Japanese pop songs.

Though Mori's Zen-drag performance flirts with campiness, there's not a speck of irony here. Overall, the video induces a meditative calm, not the hyperactive buzz usually associated with high technology.

``I'm not an engineer,'' Mori emphasizes. ``I don't have any skills to create technology. I'm interested in how to use technology to create new ideas.''

Mori's theatrical flair stems from her early training in fashion design at Bunka Fashion College in her native Tokyo. Later she turned to photography in London before taking up a one-year independent study program at the Whitney Museum of Art, which brought her to the United States in 1992. Today she maintains studios in Tokyo and New York City.

Spirituality is a new twist in Mori's evolution. In earlier works she often posed as a cyborg doll, enacting ancient Japanese rituals amid sterile urban surroundings. Her 1996 video ``Miko no inori (The shaman-girl's prayer),'' included in LACMA's exhibition, was shot in Osaka's antiseptic Kansai International Airport. Mori appears in a frosty blond wig, her eyes tinted a chilling ice-blue, menacingly stroking a crystal ball while indifferent passengers stream by.

A less robotic persona emerges in ``Nirvana,'' which uses natural marvels, not anonymous urbanscapes, for backdrops. The exhibition's largest gallery is devoted to the four oversized photo-murals incorporating vistas of the Gobi Desert, the Dead Sea, Arizona's Painted Desert and France's Massif Cave. Collectively, these sites correspond to the Buddhist elements of nature - wind, water, fire, earth and empty space - derived from the structure of mandalas, which are circular designs symbolizing wholeness in Buddhist and Hindu imagery.

Mori appears in all four photographs, mostly in flowing costumes, with wigs or elaborately sculpted headpieces she creates herself. In some she proffers lotus blossoms or other ceremonial objects. In the mural titled ``Entropy of Love,'' the artist and her sister float in a UFO-like bubble above a surreal terrain that combines elements of the Painted Desert, a California wind-power station and the dome of the Biosphere outside Tucson, Ariz.

Mori's ideas about technology attain perhaps their most tangible form in the final gallery. Here hangs the ``Enlightenment Capsule,'' a see-through teardrop-shaped acrylic sculpture incorporating a stylized lotus blossom that suggests a cocktail table lifted from a '60s airport lounge.

The sculpture is lit from within by a special fiber-optic cable that draws daylight from a special tube connected to one of the museum's outdoor patios. The beam is then filtered so as to remove ultraviolet and infrared rays, leaving only light of the utmost purity, Mori says.

In this way, she elaborates, the artificial lotus mimics a real lotus blossom, which grows out of mud but is untainted by it - just as Buddha was born into this world, but transcended it through meditation and achieved the state of nirvana.

``The human not only exists as a body, as material, but there also is a spirit which keeps moving,'' Mori observes. That same spirit should move other pilgrims to seek out ``Nirvana'' this summer.

THE FACTS

What: ``Contemporary Projects: Mariko Mori.''

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

Hours: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays. Through Aug. 10.

Admission: Adults $6, students 18 and older with ID and seniors $4, children 5 and over $1, under 5 admitted free. The second Tuesday of every month is free to all. For information, call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Mariko Mori's image looms large in the video ``Miko no inori.''

(2) This 120-by-48-inch glass panel with photo inlays is titled ``Pureland 1996-98.''