Water drips, fruit decays and electrical signals turn organic change into sound. Among the museum exhibitions worth travelling for in 2026, Yuko Mohri’s Recompose makes Yokohama the setting for an artwork that transforms every day it remains alive.
Water drips, fruit decays and electrical signals turn organic change into sound. Among the museum exhibitions worth travelling for in 2026, Yuko Mohri’s Recompose makes Yokohama the setting for an artwork that transforms every day it remains alive.
July 24, 2026
Water refuses to stay obedient in Yuko Mohri’s work. It leaks, gathers, evaporates and returns, turning ordinary household objects into fragile machines that appear to think for themselves. At Yokohama Museum of Art, Recompose brings the artist’s acclaimed Japan Pavilion presentation home from Venice, reshaping it for the port city where climate, architecture and movement become active collaborators.
The exhibition runs from July 24 to November 23, 2026, in Gallery 9, a new glass walled space created during the museum’s recent renovation. Homecoming exhibitions from Japan’s Venice Biennale pavilion usually travel to Tokyo’s Artizon Museum, yet Mohri’s presentation arrives instead in Kanagawa, the prefecture where she was born. The relocation connects Venice and Yokohama through their relationships with water, maritime exchange and constant environmental change.
Its title extends the logic of Compose, Mohri’s 2024 Venice presentation. Drawn from roots meaning “to place together,” the original project considered how coexistence might emerge within a world fractured by conflict and overlapping crises. Recompose accepts that no installation survives travel unchanged. Objects are placed together again, yet the new light, atmosphere and spatial conditions alter their behaviour, making the Yokohama edition a fresh organism rather than a reconstruction.
Two evolving series form its sensory core. Moré Moré (Leaky) takes inspiration from improvised repairs used by Tokyo subway workers to contain persistent ceiling leaks. Buckets, tubes, plastic sheets and other everyday materials become temporary water systems, carrying liquid through channels that look ingenious, vulnerable and slightly absurd. The work turns maintenance into a form of creative survival.
Decomposition listens to another kind of instability. Electrodes inserted into fruit register changing moisture levels as the organic matter decays. Those signals produce irregular sound and flickering light, allowing ripening and breakdown to compose the gallery in real time. Smell, sound and illumination shift throughout the exhibition, ensuring that no visit can be perfectly repeated.
Gallery 9 intensifies that unpredictability. Its glass walls open towards the Art Plaza, allowing sunlight, weather and urban movement to enter the work’s visual field. Across four months, seasonal changes will continually reframe the installation.
Among the museum exhibitions worth travelling for, Recompose rewards visitors with something rarer than monumental spectacle: an encounter that remains alive, unstable and responsive. Admission is free, leaving the journey centred on attention itself and on the quiet drama of systems trying, failing and adapting together. It ultimately makes impermanence feel like a shared method of living.
