Yuko Mohri: Recompose: Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan

Yuko Mohri participated in the 2024 Venice Biennale as a representative of Japan, and held a solo exhibition titled "Compose" at the Japan Pavilion under the commission of the Japan Foundation and curated by Sook-Kyung Lee.

This year sees the exhibition making a triumphant homecoming to Yokohama.

Mohri is renowned for installations that employ everyday items, natural materials, and other devices to create irregular movement, light, and noise. Her humor-tinged works express often overlooked natural laws related to the ubiquity of energy, and invisible connections and cycles between things.

The exhibition’s title at the Venice Biennale, “Compose,” suggests both musical composition and structural assembly, and has etymological roots in the Latin com (together) and pose (to place).
Mohri has long based her practice around relationships between things and the forces those relationships set in motion. Here she turns to a world fractured at every level, from the pandemic to ongoing conflicts in many parts of the world, and asks what it means to coexist and share a life with others.

The exhibition brings together two ongoing series. "Moré Moré (Leaky)," now over a decade in the making, is inspired by the chronic water leaks that plague Tokyo’s subway stations and the makeshift repairs improvised by station staff with whatever is at hand. Mohri applies the spirit of these fixes to installations of everyday objects that form impromptu systems of water circulation. "Decomposition," the second series, centers on fruit: electrodes inserted into the fruit register changes in moisture as it slowly decays, generating irregular sound and light in response. Water is the connecting thread, and both groups of works render its cycles and transformations visible. Light, sound, and scent fill the space, and together they engage the senses with quiet intensity.

Photo by Naoki Takehisa