Yuko Mohri’s Fragile Sculptures Confront the Inevitability of Change

On the first preview day of the 2024 Venice Biennale, a torrential downpour sent artists, curators, journalists, and dealers scurrying for shelter. While others fretted about how the art on view would weather the sheets of rain, Yuko Mohri, the sculptor representing Japan that year, felt unusually relaxed. If all this water destroyed a new set of her installations making their debut in the Giardini, she didn’t mind so much.

The raised building that houses the Japanese Pavilion was itself porous this time around—two skylights in the ceiling and an aperture in the floor were left open, and one sculpture was even placed beneath the cantilevered roof that holds up the structure. Another installation was itself about water, in a way. To make it, Mohri created tenuous arrangements of tables, fruits, speakers, and other refuse that she sourced from shops in Venice. Water flowed through the pavilion via plastic piping that wended its way around her secondhand objects. Part of a series called “Moré Moré (Leaky)” that Mohri began in 2015, the installation would occasionally emit sound, the result not of a prerecorded composition but of Mohri’s watermelons, apples, and oranges, all of which were pierced with electrodes that picked up currents produced as the fruits decomposed.

Begun as a response to accidental inpourings of water spotted in subway stations in Tokyo, where Mohri is based, this presentation was now about to spring leaks of its own. But Mohri wanted her work to appear fragile, and so she let the pavilion be, unfazed by the notion that her show might not entirely survive opening day. (Save for some minor damage to plastic sheeting included in one sculpture, the pavilion ended up making it out of the deluge just fine.)

With that pavilion, Mohri told me earlier this month, “I could directly collaborate with nature,” allowing sunlight, heat, and other meteorological forces to shape her exhibition over time. The notion thrilled her—and has scared other institutions that have shown her art in the past. “Museums haven’t been happy all the time,” she said. “They’ve talked about conservation. They’re concerned about organic matter, like soil, water, fruits that are decaying.” In Venice, however, “I really accepted the changing situation. I want to continue this way.”

Mohri has done so in a string of solo shows that have earned her international acclaim. One of them, her biggest survey to date, was held at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan; the show travels to the Centro Botín in Santander, Spain, next month. That exhibition, like her Venice Biennale pavilion, was characterized by assemblages of ready-made objects that took on a life of their own: a piano that played itself according to the signals of a computer interpreting the sounds of the ocean, produce whose electrical charges lit up light bulbs, an organ whose vibrations were determined by the movement of goldfish held in a tank.

To make these works, Mohri engineered ecosystems from objects that did not previously belong together. Once those ecosystems are created, she can’t control how they will function. “I’m interested in the random signals of everyday objects,” she said.

In that way, Mohri’s sculptures are unbound from the traditional rules of making and showing artworks, which historically are discrete objects that remain forever the same once they are completed. “Exhibiting Mohri’s installations in a museum is compelling because they challenge the idea of the artwork as something fixed,” said Fiametta Griccioli, a curator of the Pirelli HangarBicocca show. “Her pieces are not objects that remain unchanged—they are conditions: arrangements of sound, movement, humidity, dust, gravity, small forces that keep the work in motion and slightly unpredictable.”

That has not deterred organizations and commercial galleries from throwing their support behind Mohri. Earlier this month, she won the $50,000 Calder Prize, an award facilitated by the namesake modernist’s foundation. This week, she received her US debut, at New York’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, where she is exhibiting installations related to the ones that appeared in Venice. Later this year, she will do a commission for the Barbican Centre in London and stage solo shows at the Bass museum in Miami and the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan.

Speaking from a backroom of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery that she had turned into a makeshift studio, Mohri told me that spending so much time abroad had molded her as an artist. “I have a curiosity about how to investigate life through objects,” she said, noting that secondhand items “already have history.” Just as she rarely sketches her installations in advance of executing them, she rarely knows what she will buy when she goes shopping for the trinkets she ends up using.

So many of these objects speak to our present-day globalized economy that exploded in the 2000s, just as Mohri was beginning to make art: plastic basins produced in China may end up in New York’s Chinatown, where they might be spotted by Mohri, who might find a use for them in her work. But Mohri said she was not interested in making statements about an internationalized world or an individual’s place in it. “My way is not to investigate the global, the top,” Mohri said. “My curiosity is from the bottom.”

Mohri, 45, grew up in Kanagawa, a Japanese prefecture just south of Tokyo that has few contemporary art museums. Initially, she thought she might become a musician. Starting at age 5, she began to play the piano, and she would continue doing so for more than a decade—even though she never felt particularly attached to that instrument. “I really hated practice, but I loved piano as an instrument,” she said. “I’m not so interested in playing the piano beautifully.” This inclination aligned her more with the strategies of experimental composers such as John Cage, whose pieces involved pianists using their instruments in ways beyond what was intended—by fingering the wires instead of the keys, for example. During our interview, she also expressed admiration for Yosuke Yamashita, a Japanese jazz pianist whose most famous work, Burning Piano (1973), involved setting fire to his instrument on a beach.

The Cagean impulse appears to have stuck with Mohri. “Like Cage, she encourages active listening with sound emerging through chance and the agency of materials themselves,” said Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, the curator of the Centro Botín version of Mohri’s survey. “Her work also resonates with [Erik] Satie’s idea of furniture music: sound conceived not as spectacle but as atmosphere to live with.”

But Rodríguez Muñoz was also quick to note that Mohri’s art was “shaped by pop cultural and subcultural influences.” The curator was referencing Mohri’s short-lived period as a musician while she was a college student, during which time Mohri performed as a vocalist with the punk band Sisforsound. As she performed live, Mohri gradually realized she was never cut out to become a musician. “I’m laughing all the time, and it’s not so cool to laugh on stage,” she said, laughing. “I realized I’m much more comfortable in the audience.” While Mohri has since collaborated with composers such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Otomo Yoshihide, she has mostly stuck to producing artworks.

It quickly became obvious, however, that her sculptures toed the line between art and music. Her 2004 undergraduate thesis project for Tama Art University was a magnetized organ whose sounds were picked up by a microphone. Mohri, who went on to receive her graduate degree from the Tokyo University of Arts in 2008, took her cues from Fluxus-affiliated artists like Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono, as well as contemporary sculptors like Carsten Nicolai, all of whom made works involving sound that barely even qualified as art. “I felt like an artist using sound,” she said.

Just like the Fluxus artists, Mohri went on to produce scrappy installations from cheap, everyday objects. I/O (2011– ), one of her earliest mature sculptures, involves a sheet of paper that droops onto the floor, where it picks up dust and other tiny debris. The work looks a little like a gigantic version of hygrometers, which measure humidity levels and are commonly seen in art galleries, but this one contains a sensor that converts the electrical signals recorded from the matter around it. The piece visualizes—and audibilizes—forces that are hard to perceive: humidity and wind.

Also in 2011, Japan was rocked by an earthquake that resulted in the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Mohri began to think about her work differently. “There are all these beautiful balances between human and nonhuman, and then entropy is happening all the time,” she said. “But what is the balance between natural disasters and human beings?” She credited the quake with moving her art in an even more DIY direction.

Sook-kyung Lee, the curator who put Mohri in her 2023 Gwangju Biennale and organized the artist’s 2024 Venice show, said that Mohri’s art is all about the “cyclical nature of existence,” something that the artist has made obvious in paintings similar to ones in the Tanya Bonakdar show. In nine paintings currently on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Mohri pictures decomposing fruits stuck with electrodes, a reference to the Japanese Buddhist concept of kusozu, which holds that there are nine stages of decay. Mohri, who grew up hearing her grandmother talk constantly of death, said, “It’s pretty much natural thinking.” Referring to her 96-year-old grandmother, who is still alive today, Mohri added, “She’s just one of the elements in the globe.”

Then Mohri revealed something that she said she had never told a journalist: her Venice pavilion was a part of the cyclical nature of existence, too. As the fruit for her installations was cycled out, disused produce was placed in a compost bin beneath the pavilion, where it was allowed to decompose for months on end. The decomposition process continued well after the pavilion closed to the public—and even through the 2025 Architecture Biennale, where another Japanese Pavilion was held. Only recently, she said, was the compost turned into dirt and planted around the Giardini, not far from where her show took shape. “We made perfect soil, and we put it between pavilions,” she said. “Now, it’s a part of the permanent collection of the Giardini.”