Born Kanagawa, Japan,1980. Lives and works in Tokyo.
The recipient of the Nissan Art Award 2015, Mohri is an installation artist who recasts reconfigured everyday items and machine parts collected in cities around the world into self-contained ‘ecosystems,’ channelling and conducting intangible energies such as magnetism, gravity, temperature and light. With an artistic background in new-media art, Mohri’s practice engages with circuits and connectivity. She states that: ‘I prefer gravity, magnetism, light, and wind to control my work.’ Mohri positions forces such as gravity and electricity as otherworldly and unpredictable, and her installations insist on the powers of the nonhuman and the uncontrollable. The artist establishes her systems and then steps back, relinquishing her agency – her circuits are left to their own devices. In sound-based assemblages, Mohri’s approach has alluded to experimental artists Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, particularly though their relationship to chance. Mohri brings contingency and improvisation into her installations, aiming to capture the appearance of the world and human essence through the eyes of new materialism.
Mohri’s first solo exhibition with mother’s tankstation, slower than slowly, opened in our Dublin gallery in September 2019. Her second solo exhibition with mother’s tankstation Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye opened in our London gallery in October 2023. Notable recent solo exhibitions include: I/O, Atelier Nord, Oslo (2021); Voluta, Camden Arts Centre, London (2018); Assume That There is Friction and Resistance, Towada Art Center, Aomori, Japan (2018), Grey Skies, Fujisawa Art Center, Kanagawa, Japan (2017) and Moré Moré (Leaky), White Rainbow, London (2017). Mohri will participate in Seeing Sound, a 2023 – 2027 touring group exhibition curated by Barbara London, organised by Independent Curators International. Other selected notable group exhibitions include: soft and weak like water, 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2023), rīvus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2022); 2021 Asian Art Biennial: Phantasmapolis, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2021),Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing, 34th Bienal de São Paulo, Sao Paulo (2021); Attention, Glasgow International 2020, The Pyramid at Anderston, Glasgow (2021); trust and confusion, Tai Kwun Contemporary Hong Kong (2021), Publicness of the Art Center (Phase II), Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Japan (2019); Immortality, 5th Ural Industrial Biennial, Russia (2019); Childhood, Palais de Tokyo, France (2018); The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia (2018); The 14th Biennale de Lyon, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); Japanorama: Nouveau regard sur la création contemporaine, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2017); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India (2016); and Yokohama Triennale 2014, Japan (2014). Mohri’s works are included in international institutional collections, including M+, Hong Kong, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. In 2024 Yuko Mohri will represent Japan at the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia. The Japan Pavilion will be curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, Senior Curator of International art at Tate Modern and artistic director of the 14th Gwangju Biennale.