Yuko Mohri’s Fragile Sculptures Confront the Inevitability of Change

A torrential downpour sent artists, curators, journalists and dealers seeking shelter on the first day of previews for the 2024 Venice Biennale. While others were worried about how the artworks on display would withstand the heavy rain, Yuko Mohri, the sculptor who represented Japan that year, felt unusually relaxed. She wouldn’t mind too much if the water ruined a new set she was debuting at the Garden Garden.

This time the raised building that houses the Japan Pavilion itself is porous – two skylights in the ceiling and a hole in the floor are left open, and a sculpture has even been placed beneath the cantilevered roof that supports the structure. In a way, the other installation itself is about water. To do this, Mauri created a crude arrangement out of tables, fruit, speakers and other junk she sourced from a Venetian store. Water flows through the pavilion through plastic pipes that skirt around her second-hand items. Part of the “More More (Leaky)” series that Maury began in 2015, the installation occasionally emits sounds that are not the result of pre-recorded compositions but of Maury’s watermelons, apples, and oranges, all of which are pierced by electrodes that pick up the electric current generated as the fruit decomposes.

The speech was originally a response to unexpected water intrusions discovered at the Tokyo subway station where Mori was staying, but has now led to leaks. But Maury wanted her work to appear fragile, so she left the pavilion as is, without worrying that her show might not fully survive opening day. (Aside from some minor damage to the plastic sheeting in one sculpture, the pavilion emerged from the floods without incident.)

With the pavilion, Maury told me earlier this month, “I can work directly with nature,” letting sunlight, heat, and other meteorological forces shape her exhibits over time. The idea excites her and scares other institutions that have shown her art in the past. “Museums are not always happy,” she said. “They talked about conservation. They were worried about organic matter, like soil, water, rotting fruit.” In Venice, however, “I really embraced the change. I wanted to continue like this.”

Maury did this in a series of solo performances that earned her international acclaim. One of them, her largest survey to date, was conducted at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. The show will travel to the Centro Botín in Santander, Spain, next month. That show, like her Venice Biennale, featured an assemblage of found objects that took on a life of their own: a piano played automatically based on computer signals that interpreted the sounds of the ocean, the charge generated lit a lightbulb, an organ whose vibrations were determined by the movements of a goldfish in a tank.

To make these works, Mauri designed ecosystems using objects that did not previously belong together. Once these ecosystems are created, she has no control over how they function. “I’m interested in the random signals of everyday objects,” she said.

In this way, Māori sculpture is not bound by traditional rules for making and displaying artworks, which historically are discrete objects that remain unchanged once completed. “Having Mauri’s installations in the museum is striking because they challenge the idea of ​​artworks as fixed objects,” said Fiametta Griccioli, curator of the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca exhibition. “Her works are not immutable objects – they are conditions: an arrangement of sound, movement, humidity, dust, gravity, subtle forces that keep the work in motion and somewhat unpredictable.”

But that hasn’t stopped organizations and commercial galleries from supporting Māori. Earlier this month, she received the $50,000 Calder Prize, funded by the Modernism Foundation of the same name. This week she makes her U.S. debut at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, where she exhibits installations related to those shown in Venice. Later this year she will be commissioned to create work for the Barbican Center in London and have solo exhibitions at the Bass Museum in Miami and the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan.

Morrie tells me in the back room of the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which she has converted into a makeshift studio, that spending so much time abroad has shaped her as an artist. “I’m curious about how life can be studied through objects,” she said, noting that second-hand objects “already have a history.” Just as she rarely sketches an installation before executing it, she rarely knows what she will buy when she goes shopping for the trinkets that will ultimately be used.

Many of these objects have as much to do with our current, globalized economy as it exploded in the 2000s, just as Mauri first started making art: plastic tubs produced in China might end up in New York’s Chinatown, where Mauri might discover them, and Mauri might find a use for them in her work. But Mauri said she was not interested in commenting on the global world or one’s place in it. “My approach is not to investigate globally, at a high level,” Mauri said. “My curiosity is genuine.”

Mori, 45, grew up in Japan’s Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo, which has few contemporary art museums. Initially, she thought she might become a musician. She started playing the piano at age 5 and continued for more than a decade – although she never felt particularly attached to the instrument. “I really hate practicing, but I love the piano as an instrument,” she said. “I’m not very interested in a beautifully played piano.” This tendency puts her more in line with the strategies of experimental composers such as John Cage, in whose works the pianist uses the instrument in unexpected ways, such as by playing on wires instead of keys. During our interview, she also expressed her admiration for Japanese jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita, best known for burning piano (1973), involved setting fire to his instrument on a beach.

Mauli seems to have clung to Cage-esque impulses. “Like Cage, she encouraged active listening to voices that arise through opportunity and the materials themselves,” said Barbara Rodriguez Muñoz, curator of Bottin Editions at the Maury Center for Inquiry. “Her work also resonates with people [Erik] Satie’s view on furniture music is that sound is not a landscape, but the atmosphere of life. ”

But Rodriguez Muñoz is also quick to point out that Mauri’s art is “influenced by pop culture and subcultures.” The curators were referring to Maury’s brief period as a musician at university, during which Maury was the lead singer in the punk band Sisforsound. As she performed live, Maury came to realize that she was simply not cut out to be a musician. “I was laughing all the time, and it’s not cool to laugh on stage,” she laughs. “I realized I felt more comfortable in the audience.” Although Mori has since collaborated with composers such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yoshihide Otomo, she has focused primarily on creating artwork.

However, it soon became apparent that her sculptures toed the line between art and music. Her 2004 undergraduate thesis project at Tama Art University was a magnetized organ whose sound was picked up by a microphone. Mori, who earned a graduate degree from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2008, took inspiration from Fluxus artists like Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono, as well as contemporary sculptors like Carsten Nicolai, whose work dealt with sound and barely even qualified as art. “I feel like an artist using sound,” she said.

Like the Fluxus artists, Mauri continued to make fragmentary installations out of cheap, everyday objects. input/output (2011-) is one of her earliest mature sculptures, in which a piece of paper hangs to the floor, covered in dust and other tiny debris. The piece looks a bit like a giant version of a hygrometer used to measure humidity levels, commonly found in art galleries, but the piece contains a sensor that converts electrical signals recorded from the surrounding material. This work visualizes and auralizes hard-to-perceive forces: humidity and wind.

Also in 2011, an earthquake occurred in Japan, leading to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Maury began to think about her work differently. “There’s all this beautiful balance between humans and non-humans, and then entropy happens all the time,” she said. “But what’s the balance between natural disasters and humans?” She credits the earthquake with moving her art in a more DIY direction.

Sook-kyung Lee, the curator who included Māori in the 2023 Gwangju Biennale and organized the artist’s 2024 Venice show, said Māori’s art is all about “the cyclical nature of existence,” which is evident in the artist’s similar paintings to those in the Tanya Bonakdar show. In nine paintings currently on display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Mori depicts decomposing fruit stuck with electrodes, a reference to Japanese Buddhism’s ” Kusatsuwhich considers there to be nine stages of decay. “It’s a natural thought,” said Maury, who grew up hearing her grandmother talk about death. “She’s just one of the elements on earth,” she added of her 96-year-old grandmother, who is still alive today.

Then Mauri revealed something she had never told reporters: her Venice pavilion was also part of the cyclical nature of existence. While the fruit in her installation is recycled, the discarded produce is placed in compost bins beneath the pavilion, where it continues to decompose for months. After the pavilion was closed to the public, the decomposition process continued, even into the 2025 Architecture Biennale, which is hosting a Japanese pavilion. Until recently, she said, the compost was turned into soil and planted around Giardini Gardens, not far from where her exhibition is being held. “We made the perfect soil and put it between the pavilions,” she said. “It is now part of Giardini’s permanent collection.”