Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
‘MOT Annual 2027’ will run from 20 February through 30 May, presenting Yuki Kobayashi, Saori Hala, Mayuko Inui and tsu-tsu. The exhibition brings together four artists who approach memories connected to the past through different forms of expression, including martial arts, choreography, singing and acting, and develop the knowledge that emerges through their practices.
The exhibition describes bodily knowledge as containing sensations that cannot be fully captured through words or records, and as something that changes into new forms through repeated action rather than remaining a completed, fixed technique. It presents “passing through the body” as taking the past or others onto oneself and, through the body, finding a way to reconfigure one’s relationship with the world.
The artists’ research draws on martial-arts lineages, family histories, folktale narration and other people’s lives, combining interviews, fieldwork and archival research with sustained embodied exploration. The memories they address connect to works through movement, voice and gesture, developing into video, installation, photography and drawing. Alongside an exhibition centred on new works, the programme will include performances by each of the four artists, a jointly produced performance and a film presenting the dialogue and experimentation involved in developing that collaboration.
The display will loosely connect the works with viewers’ movement and time, creating a setting in which the works can be experienced through the body. Yuki Kobayashi’s new video and installation emerge from the ‘Wing Chun Project’, which begins with the traditional martial art Wing Chun from southern China and examines techniques and forms transmitted across regions and eras through their physical practice, their changes and new ways of passing them on. The exhibition will also show a video installation of ‘Da Dad Dada’, a performance first presented in 2017 and developed from research into the artist’s father, Ken Hara, who worked as a musical-theatre dancer in Japan and the United States during the 1960s.
The evidence identifies a new video work by Mayuko Inui and tsu-tsu’s ‘Backflow to the junction’ from 2021. ‘MOT Annual’ is a group-exhibition series launched in 1999 that centres primarily on younger Japanese artists and draws on the Tokyo-based perspective of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo to prompt questions and discussion about contemporary art.
