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 …
