MMCA Performing Arts 2024: Space Elevator
Yuko Mohri
Piano for Four Hands and Four Feet
Performance
February 22 - 23. 15:00
○ Venue: MMCA Seoul B1, MMCA Multi-Project Hall
○ Running time: 45 minutes
○ Audience: 100 people per performance
○ Tickect Price: 5,000 KRW
※ 50% discount for individuals under 24 or over 65, undergraduate students, Art Pass holders, and paid membership holders (Family, Family+)
Piano Solo: 12 January, 1900
February 24 - March 16.
○ Venue: MMCA Seoul B1, MMCA Multi-Project Hall
○ Free Exhibition Admission
Piano Solo: Tomari (2025) is a sound and performative installation presented by Yuko Mohri as a new iteration of her Piano Solo series.
Mohri first conceived the work in late 2019, shortly before travel became impossible due to Covid-19, and has since been testing and experimenting with. Its mechanism is followed by a microphone which picks up ambient sounds and those emitted during an accompanying performance, converts and plays them on a piano. She felt that the technology does not always need to follow accurately, rather, inaccurate the conversion, the result revealed plenty of true nature of those who emitted the sounds (both humans and things) so that’s how she ended up programming it. The original intention in creating this piano system was to use it in order to collaborate with dancers, poets and other performers, those mercurial and loquacious people. Then, we experienced a kind of ‘isolation’ one might expect only on a journey to outer space—an isolation in everyday life that came without warning. The artist decided to leave the urban hubbub behind to hole up in a mountain cottage by an ancient lake. The secluded, pitch dark forest would be replete with silence, she thought. Little did she know that nature, too, was mercurial, loud even, with waves discreetly beating against the shore, rain drizzling on rice paddies, trees rustling in the wind, bonfires crackling, water birds squawking, endemic freshwater fish getting grilled over the charcoal. . . . Grateful for Amazon.com’s crazy system of delivering everything to even the remotest of areas within two days of order, she got herself a Shure microphone and recorded, day after day, the sounds of the natural world. As the natural world began to feel closer and familiar, the human world felt increasingly foreign and distant, like outer space.
For MMCA, Mohri’s inspirational source landed in Tomari, Obama-city in Fukui prefecture. The installation is composed of a piano and newly filmed footage from the Tomari area, a coastal region facing the East Sea, known for significant historical connections to Korea. In 1900, this area became the site of a humanitarian event when local villagers provided shelter and aid to 93 Korean seamen who had been shipwrecked during a typhoon. After departing from Vladivostok on November 27, 1899, and drifting for 47 days, these exhausted travelers found unexpected kindness on these shores. Documents detailing this act of compassion, including thank-you letters from the Korean survivors were discovered in 1997. In commemoration of such an event and story, a stone monument was erected in Tomari in 2000, after a century. The inscription in both Japanese and Korean reads, “The sea is like a mother connecting people.” Mohri’s footage captures the environmental and sonic characteristics of this historically resonant location, complementing the live performance and sound installation while quietly acknowledging the deep human connections of seaman-ship beyond our national borders embedded in this coastal landscape.
“This year on January 12, I visited Tomari, located in Fukui Prefecture.
It was the same day 125 years ago, a Korean ship drifted off the coast of Tomari, in a sea of pale blue and gray colors. 93 crew members, lost for a month and a half, were led by chance to a small village in Fukui. Through my research, I met Mr. Kazuyoshi Oomori and he told me that living together with people who spoke a completely different language and had a different way of life made them uneasy to get along at the beginning. However, they began understanding each other over time, and on the day they returned home in Korea, they all cried as if they were one family. Mr. Oomori is the grandson of one of the persons who welcomed the crew members at Tomari, and even now, more than 100 years later, he continues to tell this story of that time in books and songs he made.
You may say the ocean is separating something, but it is merely imagination. Rather, it is a path.
While filming, on a beach where there was a sprinkling of rain, I found empty cans and plastic bottles that appeared to have reached ashore from afar. Although I didn’t understand any of those words written in Korean, Chinese, and other languages in the litter drifted in, I imagined about the various interactions beyond the borders that the ocean bridged together.”
— Yuko Mohri
As an opening act of Mohri’s presentation "Piano Solo: 12 January, 1900" for the first time in Korea, Akio Suzuki, a legendary sound artist is joining Yuko Mohri to present a live performance Piano for Four Hands and Four Feet.
The collaboration between the improvising musician Suzuki and Mohri dates back to 2017, when Mohri presented her solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre in London. In summer of 2020, when the pandemic swept the world away, a video documentation of their performance in front of a very limited audience was later compiled into Parking for Quarantine. MMCA will also showcase this work during the exhibition period in a separate space.
It takes about an hour by car from Suzuki’s home on the coast of Kyoto to Tomari. It is also fair to mention that Suzuki has also seen the same sea Mohri captured in the video that people saw back in 1900.
Yuko Mohri
Yuko Mohri is an artist who creates installation and sculpture not to compose (or construct) but to focus on ‘events’ that constantly shift according to various conditions including their environment. In recent years, she has also explored this idea through video and photography. In 2015, Mohri received a grant from the Asian Cultural Council for a 6-month residency in New York. In the same year, she received the Grand Prix, Nissan Art Award. In 2016, Mohri took a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and was in residence at the Camden Arts Centre, London. 2018 saw her as an East Asian Cultural Exchange Envoy, visiting 4 cities in China. In 2019, she received a grant from the Institut français for a 3-month residency in Paris. She represented the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Her major solo exhibitions have been showcased at Artizon Museum titled On Physis in 2024–2025, the Japanese Pavilion of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia Compose in 2024, at Camden Arts Centre, in 2018, and at Towada Art Center in 2018. Mohri has also taken part in a number of international group shows such as the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022); Asian Art Biennial (2021); 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); Glasgow International (2021); the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018); 14th Biennale de Lyon, France (2017); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016).
Akio Suzuki
Since his infamous Throwing Objects Down a Staircase event at Nagoya Station in 1963 and the self-study events which followed, where he explored the processes of ‘projection’ and ‘following’ in the natural world, Suzuki has pursued listening as a practice. In the 1970s he created and began performing on a number of original instruments, including the echo instrument Analapos. In 1988 he performed his piece Space in the Sun, which involved purifying his ears for twenty-four hours in nature on the meridian line that runs through Amino, Kyoto. In 1996, he began his o to da te project where he seeks out echo points in the urban environment. Akio has performed and exhibited at many venues and music festivals around the world, including Documenta8 (Germany, 1987), the British Museum (UK, 2002), Musée Zadkine (France, 2004), Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany, 2018), and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo, 2019) among others.
※ Notes
- Program is available to reserve through [Exhibition Tickets]-[Performing Arts] on February 7th at 14:00.
- Admission will not be allowed once the program has begun. Please arrive at the Multi-Project Hall at least 10 minutes prior to the start time.
- Ticket cancellations are accepted until 6:00 p.m. the day before the performance. Cancellations will not be accepted after this time.
- Tickets are non-transferable. If you cannot attend, please cancel your reservation.
- Beginning in November 2024, ticket prices for performances will vary based on each performance’s nature, scale, and format. Please check inpidual performance fees.
- The exhibition will run from February 24 to March 16, following the performances on February 22–23. No reservation is required, and admission is free.
Artist: Yuko Mohri
Assistant (Japan): Koshiro Shikine
Technical Assistant (Korea): Seoyoung Kwak
Coordination: Shintaro Tokairin
Special Thanks: Kazuyoshi Oomori, Yui Yoshizumi, Akio Suzuki, Hiromi Miyakita, and YAMAHA Korea
Commissioned by The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Image © Yuko Mohri Studio
