YUKO MOHRI: UNVIOLATED IMPERFECTION
The Bass presents Unviolated Imperfection, Tokyo-based artist Yuko Mohri’s first solo exhibition in a US museum, on view September 17, 2026 through May 30, 2027. The exhibition spans three galleries, each highlighting three interconnected ideas that embody her exploration of imperfect compositions. Through nature and technology in Decomposition, improvisation and kinetics in Moré Moré (Leaky), and chance and sound in Piano Solo, the installations reveal the invisible systems that connect people, objects, and environments.
Bringing her improvisational practice into the museum, Mohri challenges the idea that artwork is unchanging. Rather than a fixed medium, her pieces revolve around actions that take place because of their site-specificity. Mohri transforms everyday objects into Rube Goldberg machines: complex, multi-sensory constructions in which each element influences the others. Beyond objects, her artistic media includes the forces that form the conditions of our world—gravity, light, and time—creating her self-propelled, kinetic installations, reliant on improvisation, chance, and physics.
The title of the exhibition was inspired by Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern (1990), a book by well-known architectural scholar, Aaron Betsky, which examines the disruption of modernist principles through disunion. Similarly, for Mohri, imperfection is not a flaw to be corrected, but a condition that allows systems to remain responsive, adaptable, and alive. Architecture isn’t the only boundary Mohri blurs; she often brings together physical materials and sound. Inspired by the abstract electronic sound works developed by avant-garde composers like John Cage and David Tudor, she plays with matter and energy, highlighting invisible connections between the natural and the built that coincide in our world.
The first gallery holds Mohri’s Decomposition, a title that speaks to both the decay of organic matter and the artist’s deconstruction of expectations around sound, challenging traditional perceptions of music. Visitors enter a darkened space filled with shifting musical tones and pulses of light projected across on a large LED screen, the fluctuations generated by slowly decaying fruit. In the dim space, a tableau of fruits commonly found growing in South Florida appear still to the naked eye. The fruits are perforated by electrodes that capture their subtle changes in moisture as they gradually deteriorate. The sensors translate changing electrical signals into constantly evolving pitches—heard through the speakers to which they’re connected—as well as light intensity readings viewed on a large, pulsing LED light screen. As the fruit slowly changes, they produce a composition that is never the same twice. These abstract electronic tones reference the experimental sound of the 1970s synth-rock band, Suicide, who were pioneers of minimalist electronic music. Like the legacy of music itself, Decomposition emphasizes how life continues after severance from its initial context, producing meaning in unexpected places and moments.
Through Mohri’s interest in directly collaborating with nature, allowing natural processes to shape the work over time, she brings together ideas from both Western and Eastern artistic and cultural traditions. She combines these customary notions by representing the Western convention of painting still life, which used the temporary nature of fruit to highlight the artistic mastery of capturing something alive in a fleeting moment. At the same time, the work references Kusōzu, a series of Buddhist images, common topic in Buddhist art and poetry, depicting the nine stages of bodily decomposition and commonly associated with ideas of impermanence. Although emerging from different cultural traditions, both references reflect an interest in transformation and the passage of time. The notion of decomposition prompts reflection on the difference between being still and being alive. Utilizing dying organics to create new experiences of light and sound underlines the zombie-like composition of Mohri’s installation.
In an adjacent gallery, Mohri stages a new version of her cornerstone installation, Moré Moré (Leaky), previously shown at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Here, water moves through an intricate network of found objects, creating a chain reaction of sounds, motion, and unexpected connections. This installation is reinvented with found objects from secondhand sources in Miami. The inspiration for this work comes from the artist’s preoccupation with improvisational, and often humorously complex, solutions to ceiling leaks in Tokyo’s underground stations. The work reflects the irony of a high-tech, industrial city that is still unable to overcome simple, environmental realities or find a permanent solution to solve the problem, leading to inefficient, yet whimsical, temporary fixes that generally prove unsustainable. Mohri again highlights that life seeps into the seemingly inactive and how both humans and the built environment are constantly in a dance with nature, turning ordinary situations into acts of creativity. She does this by deliberately inciting a “leak” in the gallery and uses uncommon materials to “solve” the leak, with electric pumps creating a closed loop to keep the water in an unnecessarily complicated, but delightful circuit.
Inspired by artist Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, Mohri curiously investigates the human experience using objects as a departure point. By rebuilding the work with objects sourced locally, Mohri allows each installation to reflect the character and history of the place in which it is presented. In our present fast-paced, consumerist culture, many objects that are found in secondhand stores are products of our globalized economy, which has reached a fever pitch since the 2000s, a time coinciding with the beginning of Mohri’s artistic practice. Using discarded consumer goods, the installation questions how we can exist together during multiple global crises. The installation highlights a hopeful creativity born from necessity, inviting a grassroots approach. Because the work is rebuilt in each location through her improvisational approach, the installation supports the idea of the inevitability of change. Each of Mohri’s works are born from and can only exist in their present circumstances and conditions, remaining unpredictable and alive.
In the largest gallery, an installation called Piano Solo centers a self-playing grand piano, staged in conversation with a large LED screen that features rolling footage of the ocean, shot from both coasts along Miami Beach. Ocean waves become an evolving musical score as environmental sounds are translated into notes played by the grand piano, blending recorded waves with live composition. This element of the installation is inspired by John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946–48), a complicated piece where the set up for each presentation is unique and is meant to be played however feels best to the artist. Like Cage’s experiments with chance and uncertainty, Mohri’s resulting composition is shaped by forces outside the artist’s direct control, including nature, other humans, and translation to technology
Although Mohri studied piano as a child, she became more interested in sound than classical performance. After a brief stint singing in a punk band in college, she now describes herself as a “de-composer,” using environmental conditions rather than technical mastery to create music.
Complementary to the piano installation are additional sculptural interventions reminiscent of Moré Moré (Leaky). Hung on a zig-zag wall and referencing byōbu (traditional Japanese folding screens often used as decorative room dividers), a mix of recognizable and deconstructed objects are mounted to the panels. They interact with and affect one another via chance and time, maintaining subtle fluctuations across the piece. This arrangement widens the conversation of Mohri’s confluence of sound and sculpture— drawing attention to forces in art we often overlook such as air, movement, and spontaneity.
