The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

111 ARTISTS Breath or Echo 2017 Modified pianos, street light, light bulbs, wood, electric motor, paper, iron, ceramic insulators, concrete, cables and magnets / Installed dimensions variable / Purchased with funds from Tim Fairfax ac through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2018 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / Installation view Sapporo International Art Festival 2017 / Photograph: Ikuya Sasaki / Image courtesy: The artist and Project Fulfill, Taipei YUKO MOHRI Born 1980, Kanagawa, Japan Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan With a background in music and intermedia art, Yuko Mohri has developed an installation practice based around automated instruments created from found objects, which make subtle use of space, light and gravity. Many of her projects are developed specifically for particular sites; they explore themes relevant to the location and materials are sourced nearby. Inspired by the vast landscape of Japan’s northernmost island Hokkaido and the work of celebrated modernist sculptor Sunazawa Bikky (1931–89), Mohri’s expansive installation Breath or Echo 2017 presents a subtle soundscape of electronic pulses and delicate percussive resonances over which automatic pianos play elegant compositions. With Breath or Echo , Mohri is in a dialogue with Bikky’s Four Winds 1986, an outdoor sculpture installed in Sapporo Art Park. Carved from towering spruce logs, only one of the four columns that initially constituted Bikky’s work remains standing, the others having decayed with the elements over time. Bikky once described the work as being at the mercy of ‘chisels of wind and snow’, and this was in keeping with the artist’s wishes that the sculpture eventually return to nature. 1 Similarly, Mohri’s Breath or Echo is a sonic rumination on this cycle of creation and decay. The work also features a recording of the poem Bikky composed to accompany his original sculpture. Addressed to the wind, it describes a beast whose four heads and four legs correspond to the seasons, to which Bikky offers a set of four-legged trousers. Mohri responded to the poem with scores created in collaboration with the composers Ryuichi Sakamoto and Camille Norment, played on modified pianos accompanied by small instruments constructed from magnets and bells. The pianos were all produced in Sapporo, Hokkaido’s capital, and have been stripped down and automated by the artist, so that, unlike commercial pianolas, they have a textured, sculptural appearance. The smaller percussion instruments play more random arrangements; rigged with magnets, they tap and tinkle in accordance with forces of attraction and repulsion. In the same space, street lights flicker quietly at the end of poles laid in unusual configurations. They provide a visual and spatial complement to a musical piece that is open, unhurried and contemplative. Long gaps between notes create silences that might be filled by the wind invoked by Bikky’s sculpture and poem. Mohri originally created Breath or Echo for the Sapporo International Art Festival and it was installed in the Skyway, a structure linking two buildings of the Sapporo City University on a forested hillside adjacent to the site of Bikky’s Four Winds . There, the 80-metre-long Skyway corridor provided an additional layer to the work through the effect of sound delay — the work’s voices and tones echoed along a space and changed depending on the position of the viewer–listener. For APT9, the work occupies GOMA’s River Lounge, and is in dialogue with both natural and urban surroundings, altogether distinct from Sapporo’s woody, mountainous fringe. Transposing the work to a new context, Mohri creates a delayed effect by introducing an outdoor element. Through an arrangement of speakers on the southern edge of the building, Mohri extends her installation outside, where Sakamoto and Norment’s compositions, as well as Bikky’s playful words, resonate in the open space outside the Gallery’s walls. Reuben Keehan Endnote 1 ‘Sunazawa Bikky’, Sapporo International Art Festival 2014 , <www.sapporo-internationalartfestival.jp/2014/en/artists/bikky- sunazawa>, viewed July 2018.