Yuko Mohri was born in 1980 in Kanagawa, Japan, and currently lives in Tokyo. The artist creates installations that provide sensory experiences of intangible and invisible forces such as magnetic force, gravity, and light.
Her recent solo exhibitions include SP. by yuko mohri (Ginza Sony Park, Tokyo, 2020), Voluta (Camden Art Centre, London, 2018), and Mohri Yuko: Assume That There Is Friction and Resistance (Towada Art Center, Japan, 2018). She has also participated in exhibitions in Japan and abroad, such as Glasgow International 2021 (Scotland), Asia Pacific Triennial 2018 (Brisbane, Australia), the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon 2017 (France), the Yokohama Triennale 2014 (Kanagawa, Japan), among others.
In 2015, she went to the United States as a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council (ACC). In the same year, she won the Grand Prize at the "Nissan Art Awards" and, in 2016, the "Culture and Future Prize" at the "Kanagawa Culture Award". In the following year, she received the New Face Award from the Japanese government's "67th Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts." In 2018, she was chosen as the East Asian Cultural Exchange Envoy of Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs to visit China.
Currently, Mohri teaches in the Global Art Practice program at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts. She is also one of the artists participating in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021).
It is evident that Yuko Mohri has absorbed influences that cross geographical and time borders: Marcel Duchamp (France, 1887-1968), creator of the ready-made concept, devised works of art in the 20th century by combining everyday objects produced on a large scale, is one of them.
Aside from Duchamp, another important inspiration for Mohri was the composer Erik Satie (France, 1866-1925), father of the "furniture music" genre, which purpose was to occupy space without highlighting sound. This possibly was a precursor to the "non-places" concept, a term employed by the anthropologist Marc Augé (France, 1935) to designate spaces of transience that cannot have their own identity.
Still in the musical realm, John Cage (USA, 1912-1992). A pioneer of aleatoric music and the use of non-conventional instruments, Cage went to Japan several times and, fascinated with its culture, created many musical works that are well-known among Japanese audiences. In 1983, Cage composed Ryoanji, motivated by his visit to the stone garden at the Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto.
With so many international inspirations and resonances, the installation exhibited for the first time at Japan House São Paulo is composed of elements from two of Mohri's works with roots that are markedly Japanese: Parade (2011-) and Moré Moré (2015-).
The artist's delicate, yet potent installations evoke ideas such as transience and impermanence, concepts that are very present in Japanese culture, creating ecosystems composed of kinetic and audible sculptures that have a cause-and-effect relationship with their environment.
Parade was created after the long observation of the Ofuna Flower Center, a botanical garden in Kanagawa, where Yuko Mohri was able to notice and take in time's passing and the incessant changes she observed in concrete form: seeds, leaves, and flowers modify themselves, intricately dependent upon the environment which surrounds them.
The apparent and valued simplicity is supported by sophisticated technology: the installation includes a machine developed by the artist with the help of engineers (based on an Arduino, an open-source electronic prototyping board). The images of a tablecloth are translated into electrical currents which run through many wires, producing unexpected reactions in the objects scattered around the exhibition space.
Moré Moré also is, in its essence, impermanent and transitory. In it, Mohri induces leaks and tries to stop them, to make the water flow again through the damaged system. The inspiration came from an urban observation, followed by photographic records made by the artist, of water leakage in the Tokyo subway, in 2009. Teams at the stations used an array of recipients, such as bottles, buckets, umbrellas, and tubes, to contain the flow of water, thus creating involuntary sculptures.
Parade, a symphony of day-to-day objects. Moré Moré, generated as a result of the attentive gaze of Augé's "non-places". Both focus on the artist's appropriations of her surroundings, evoking different flows and rhythms.
As a tribute to Tom Jobim's composition Águas de Março, the exhibit Parade – a drip, a drop, the end of the tale is a reinterpretation of the artist's work, a tropicalised version made from the relationship she established between the objects in her installation and the lyrics of the famous Brazilian song.
Unravelling a sequence of day-to-day objects in a poetic collage, Mohri turns visible the term you no bi, coined by philosopher Sōetsu Yanagi (Japan, 1889-1961), which resignifies common objects and utensils, exalting beauty in the ordinary and the perception of the value of simplicity.
Yuko Mohri's installations investigate gravity, magnetism, and light as factors of perceptible presence in spaces. The artist evokes ideas of energy and intangible force. She causes curiosity and amazement, with objects taken away from their primary functions and weaved into a poetic web, enhanced in this spatial collage.
Their delicate balance explores and challenges the uncontrollable.
Natasha Barzaghi Geenen
Cultural Director and exhibition curator
In February 2020, I paid a technical visit to Japan House São Paulo. It was my first time in Brazil, where I encountered weather diametrically opposite to that of the Japanese winter. The city was full of intense energy because of the preparations for Carnaval and, as I strolled through the streets of São Paulo, holding a glass of sugarcane juice on my hand, I would stop to admire the tangled cables suspended from the utility poles. Musing on this spectacle, I let my thoughts run wild about what kind of site-specific installation I could create in this wonderful environment.
Soon after my return to Japan, however, as is well known, the spread of the coronavirus led to a global pandemic. As a result, the exhibition was postponed, and unfortunately, I am still unable to travel back to Brazil.
I usually create my works by combining everyday utilitarian objects with natural phenomena, such as light and wind. The group of objects connected to these phenomena, and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s song "Águas de Março," which makes us nostalgic for late summer, border on the "poetry of beings and things" that I aimed for in this work. The exhibition’s title is a line borrowed from the lyrics of this song that I like so much.
Yuko Mohri