Artists

Yuko Mohri

Press release

The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.[i] In random conversation – in itself a precious thing – Yuko Mohri noted, that (one assumes due to Japan’s easterly location and consequently early sunsets) in relative linguistic terms, ‘evenings’ in Japan are really more like ‘late afternoons’ and evenings themselves, as we understand them, night. The Cognitive Scientist Lera Boroditsky, makes this point explicitly; that how we ‘understand’ is dependent on the minutia of cultural conditioning, and the problem with ‘communication’ centres on the use of language to relativise ideas. For example, just because one person linguistically points to a word, and another person points to the same word, it does not concretely determine that the understanding of the concept that word represents the same thing. The important new book by Dan Adler[ii], Nakanishi Natsuyuki and the Global History of Postwar and Contemporary Sculpture, looking at the history of experiential, ephemeral, anti-object sculpture and installation, importantly hinges on the agreed understanding of Capitalism and, specifically object, as both concept and currency: A thing of value? Unlike an ‘apple’, for example… Yuko Mohri, with her background of performativity, music (punk bands), repair, make-and-do-improvisation, and the re-purposing of used, redundant things and/or Akihabara[iii] electronics (and cultural aesthetics), makes her a contemporary champion in the attempted communication of such important ideas in an era of materialism and greed. How then do we read and understand Yuko Mohri’s intent in the distinct strands of her new installation for mother’s tankstation | London, opaquely titled, 12 Red. An over-large dining table, in both length and height, and unexpectedly finished in a spectral white, spookily bisects the two architectural volumes of the gallery, hovering in and out of both, but only seen as a single contiguous thing, when viewed from the windows outside on the street [iv]. An opaque vinyl covering has been removed from the right hand window, as Mohri put it, “…let’s make it naked…” to facilitate a “clean” view. What were we saying about communication in respect of conditioned understandings? In the bilateral use of ‘related’ words to communicate a specific, like “uncover”, the specific idea or ‘communication’ is retained, but with an expanded sensory perception, elaboration, of the performative activity of uncovering, as ‘event’. In many respects this unlocks much of Mohri’s notional use of objects as activised language. Things do not necessarily have to retain a memory of what they were. Regularly laid out along the centre length of the snow white table are twelve equally shocking red apples implanted with electrodes. Black linear cables flow from one side of the table to floating, randomly flickering light bulbs. Decaying apples and consequent changes in moisture levels orchestrate the play of light, speaking the international visual and auditory language of decomposition Mohri has begun to create post her magical Venice installation, Compose.[v] The visual contrast between snow and blood may heavily shunt the viewer to Brothers Grimm, but the title, 12 Red, and Mohri’s conceptual interest in experiential, ephemeral, anti-object sculpture intelligently tugs us in another direction to 1970s FLUXUS Los Angeles and Alison Knowles canonical “100 apples” performative installation, officially titled 99 Red North. Knowles event was held on a broken-down outdoor tennis court at Villa Cabrini, Burbank, California, a former Catholic girls’ school that served as the first interim campus for CalArts in 1970. Knowles neatly lined up the fruit in three rows, pointing north, and participants were invited to swap apples for material processions. 100 Apples is art historically seen as an encapsulation of the Fluxus philosophy of trading-out heavy, commercialised art objects (things of conspicuous value) for everyday, and particularly, organic things – ordinary/valueless/overlooked. In apocryphal lore from the performance, a participant was so moved by the radical simplicity of Knowles’ work that he traded his car keys, declaiming that he should walk to work from then on… I assume, given the nature of LA as a legendarily impossible pedestrian city, they were making an extravagant point. Those were the days. Mohri’s sculpture, running east-to-west, similarly invites visitors to the gallery to make trades for apples, but we should note, we can now only accept EVs… To be precise, the audience is theoretically invited to swap other fruits for the apples (please seek assistance in doing so), to alter the visual of the sculpture in space and time. Yuko Mohri’s masterful creation of domains within spaces facilitates separate but intertwining moods and atmospheres, to which the participant – comparative to Boroditsky’s notions of relative communication – physically and intellectually steps from one to another. Similarly to her intertwined zones of Moré Moré (Leaky) and Decomposition in the Japan pavilion at Venice, Mohri again mixes her metaphors of circular recycling and repair. Placing and prioritising the major structures before street-view windows, so the ‘art’ is consciously made to communicate directly with the public, defusing itself as a perception or valued/valuable cultural currency[vi] . A predominantly silver incarnation of Moré Moré (Leaky), inspired by the improvisational genius of Tokyo metro station workers, dealing with leaking, flowing water post-earthquakes and typhoons, dominates one street window. The closed-circuit system circulates litres of water from container-to-container, heart-beating, via pulsating transparent tubing and funnels. Suspended from the ceiling and a mobile clothes rack, stretched and positioned by delicate nylon line and influenced by early water pump works by Hans Haacke, a small commercial pump on the floor lifts water upwards against gravity. From where it gradually and comically descends. Little by little, drop, small flow, held, moved along, funnelled, returned to source, to be returned in a Sisyphean throb, on high. Rinse and repeat. A final window frames a bronze candelabra sitting on the floor, electric cables like linear graphics from a Duchamp studio photograph, flow out to distant flickering bulbs. A simple motor flicks-out silver wires to establish tiny, temporary circuits that momentarily illuminate the bulbs and sound delicate temple bells. In concert[vii] with a cymbal from Leaky, an irregular pulsating rhythm from the other room, create the exhibition’s sonic environment. You will have to come into the gallery to hear this. Through separate doors… You can meet yourself in the middle. Brothers Grimm, or FLUXUS. Sender or receiver. Did I say that clearly? [i] Dr. Lera Boroditsky (Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego) is a leading voice in linguistic relativity. They continue: “We often believe we have communicate; “Oh, I said clearly…”, And then you realise communication is about the ‘receiving’ end, not the ‘sending’ end. Just because you said something, it doesn’t mean that another person understood it, they could have interpreted exactly the opposite.” [ii] Dan Adler, “Assemblage in an expanded field”, Nakanishi Natsuyuki and the Global History of Postwar and Contemporary Sculpture, Accounting for Assemblage, Routledge, 2026. [iii] Akihabara is a district in Tokyo, formerly a kind of electronics graveyard from the era at the end of World War II, that has become celebrated as the capital of Japanese otaku, culture, electronics, manga and video games. [iv] One communicated idea is that this tactic of placing a long table tightly fitted through the doorway of two interconnecting spaces acknowledges the expansion of mother’s tankstation’s, of one-into-the-other. Also forcing the use of two separate doorways to view the exhibition. [v] Japan Pavilion, 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The installation similarly integrated several strands of Mohri’s practice combining Moré Moré (Leaky) constructions with Decompositions. [vi] C.f. Dan Adler. “Mohri offers a performative production that relies on moving parts—both human and non-human—and a blurring of boundaries between incidental and protagonistic elements. Her enactment of messy materialism is happening within a modernist structure—and to some extent is intended to trigger memories and historical insights that colonialist and imperialist ideologies have sought to suppress”. Pg.179 [vii] In Concert. The title of Mohri’s concurrent exhibition at The Curve, Barbican Centre, London.