Yuko Mohri. Entanglements

These signals activate a series of objects such as dusters, musical instruments, light bulbs, and blinds, which move and produce sounds.

Moré Moré (Leaky): Variations (Flow #1, Flow #2, Flow #3 draws inspiration from the makeshift repairs found in the Tokyo subway lines, improvised responses to leaks. For the artist, these provisional interventions are forms of creative resilience.

The installation consists of three sections: Flow #1 uses kitchen utensils with a metallic clatter; in Flow #2 a clothes-drying rack makes gloves sway playfully, accompanied by the sound of friction from the suspended clothespins; in Flow #3 a cymbal is struck rhythmically.

In Flutter goldfishes swim gracefully inside an aquarium equipped with external sensors that detect their movements. Nearby, copper coils generate a magnetic field that disrupts the needle of the compass, causing it to sway, and a long chain shifts back and forth. 

These three types of motion trigger intermittent electrical signals, which in turn activate the automatic performance of a reed organ, an aerophone keyboard instrument—also called a harmonium—played by metal reeds vibrating under air pressure.

Piano Solo: Belle-Île consists of a mechanical piano and a video of a coastal landscape, a tribute to the Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s work Belle-Île, effet de pluie (1886). Mohri traveled to the island to film the same stretch of rocky coastline that had inspired the painting.

The video is screened in dialogue with an automated piano, whose keys’ movement is triggered by acoustic stimuli from the recording of the video. Nature itself becomes the performer, and the sounds collected are converted into input for the piano.

In Magnetic Organ two wire antennas, set opposite each other, interact through an electromagnetic field, destabilized by mobile elements. The resulting acoustic feedback from the microphones is similar to a faint sound resembling chirping of crickets.

Decomposition draws on the pictorial tradition of the Western still life and Eastern Buddhist-painting tradition of kusōzu, with rotting fruit connected to sensitive sensors capable of detecting tiny internal changes. 

The resulting ever-shifting data is converted in real time into fluctuating tonal change and energy that powers a backlit panel.

Aranya Art Center, Hebei (2024); Atelier Nord, Oslo (2021); Japan House São Paulo (2021); Ginza Sony Park, Tokyo (2020); Towada Art Center, Aomori (2018–19); Camden Art Centre, London (2018);

National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2012). Mohri has represented Japan at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

She has also participated in various group exhibitions, including the Gwangju Biennale (2023); Biennale of Sydney (2022); PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2022); Asian Art Biennial, Taichung (2021); Bienal de São Paulo (2021);

Glasgow International (2021); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2018); Biennale de Lyon (2017); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016); Yokohama Triennale, Kanagawa (2014).