MOT Annual 2027: Embodying

MOT Annual is a yearly group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo that offers critical perspectives on the contemporary art scene. MOT Annual 2027, the 21st in the series, introduces the four artists Yuki Kobayashi, Saori Hala, Mayuko Inui, and 筒｜tsu-tsu.
Through forms of expression ranging from martial arts and choreography to singing and acting, these artists use their own bodies to find new purchase on memories entangled with the past and develop the insights arising from this process into new works of art.
Knowledge cultivated through the body includes sensations that cannot be fully captured in words or documents. “Embodying” is not a perfected and fixed technology, but an act performed repeatedly and taking on new forms each time. It is a way of bringing the past or others into the self and then reconstructing a relationship to the world through the body.

The four artists featured at MOT Annual 2027 take martial arts lineages, family history, folk storytelling, and other lives as the starting point for an ongoing, embodied investigation incorporating interviews, fieldwork, and archival research. The memories confronted during this process are converted through movement, voice, and gesture into art that finds expression in forms ranging from video and installation pieces to photography and drawing.
Along with the chiefly new works showcased at MOT Annual 2027, the exhibition period will feature both individual and group performances during the exhibition period. A video work will also be presented documenting the dialogue and experimentation among the artists during the process of preparing this group performance. The structural balance between exhibits and performance will show how each artist’s history of practice now emerges as expression through the work of embodying.

Highlights of the exhibition

New Work from Four Artists
At MOT Annual 2027, four artists active across multiple expressive domains, Yuki Kobayashi, Saori Hala, Mayuko Inui, and 筒｜tsu-tsu, offer exhibits centered around new work based on bodily practice. These embodied investigations are the basis for expanded works that incorporate a range of media, including video art, installations, photographs, and drawings.

Experiences at the Intersection of Bodies and Space
The MOT Annual 2027 exhibition space is designed by the architectural collective Garage (Hayao Odagiri, Kenji Seo, and Mizuho Watanabe). Garage engages with architecture through its relationship with time and the body, taking a crossdisciplinary approach that includes video and fieldwork. Their design loosely binds the works exhibited to the space containing them amid the movements and time of the visitors, creating a site where work can be experienced in an embodied fashion.

Individual and Group Performance
The MOT Annual 2027 exhibition will feature both individual performances by the artists and a group performance jointly developed by all four artists through dialogue and experimentation. A video (film) capturing the creative process in which multiple embodied practices were brought together into a single unified whole will also be screened, recording the words and gestures exchanged among the artist as captured by filmmaker/artist Shun Ikezoe.

Artist Profiles

Yuki Kobayashi
Yuki Kobayashi showcases new video and installation work as part of his Wing Chun Project based on the traditional southern Chinese martial art of the same name, exploring new approaches to inheritance and the changes that arise through embodied practice of the techniques and patterns transmitted across different regions and eras.

Kobayashi uses his own body as an androgynous form in three-dimensional space to question fixed notions around gender and race and express both constraint and fludity. Skeptical of restrictive social codes in a world where liberty and equality are uncertain, he presents performance art exploring the meaning of human existence. His research on Wing Chun began in Hong Kong after receiving a Individual Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) in 2024. Winner of the Terrada Art Award 2025 Meruro Washida Prize.

Saori Hala
Saori Hala’s presentation is a video installation based on her performance piece Da Dad Dada (2017–). Da Dad Dada addresses fragmented family memories and the structure of time superimposed over them, growing out of Hala’s research on her father Ken Hara, who performed as a dancer in musicals in Japan and the US during the 1960s. It reexamines both memories handed down through different eras and across national borders and the bodies that serve as their medium of transmission.

Saori Hala creates performance works incorporating compound media ranging from light and sound to text, drawings, and her own body. Using her background in design theory and ecological psychology, she choreographically reinterprets and repositions perceptual experiences under specific conditions, connecting them to both the reality and fictionality of performance. She was a 2020–2021 Art Commission Yokohama Artist Fellow and has been a Saison Foundation Artist Fellow since 2025.

Mayuko Inui
Taking the legends of Toyotama-hime and Yao Bikuni as her starting point, Mayuko Inui traces similar legendary motifs in countries around the world, contemplating their representations of gender and the nature of the bodies that narrate them from generation to generation. Her new work at MOT Annual 2027 uses song and narrative to addresses the relationships among bodies, time, and land from a transnational perspective.

Mayuko Inui creates performance and video art using her own body and drawing on feminism and queer theory. In recent years, she has taken an interest in gender representation in folk tales and old stories and how songs and narratives change as they are transmitted from one generation to the next. She received the Heisei Geijutsu Award in 2020 and the Contemporary Art Foundation (CAF) Award, Kodama Kanazawa Prize in 2021. In 2024 she was a finalist for the first Bug Art Award.

筒｜tsu-tsu
筒｜tsu-tsu’s new installation piece is based on his travel across the United States in 2026 as part of the 01.25.1997 series, in which he retraces the steps of and performs as the 350,000 people around the world who share his date of birth. According to 筒｜tsu-tsu, performance never ends. The traces of his acting and his stage settings speak of the way strangers encountered through a confluence of coincidence can continue to emerge through a single body.

Training as a child in traditional Japanese dance alerted 筒｜tsu-tsu to the sensation of 筒｜tsu-tsu, literally “hollowness,” in which the body becomes a passageway used by others. He refers to his techniques for interviewing real people and enacting and remembering their thoughts and emotions in performance as “documentary acting.” He founded the artist-run residence 6okken in Kawaguchiko, Yamanashi. in 2022. In 2026 he received an Asian Cultural Council (ACC) New York Fellowship, and in the same year he was a resident in Stockholm under the Swedish government’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts (IASPIS). In 2023, he was included in Forbes Japan’s “30 Under 30.”

Related Programs

Artist talks, performances, and other events will take place during the exhibition. Further details, including how to participate, will be announced on the museum’s website.