Commissioned for Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s documenta 13, MON CHERI: A Self-Portrait as a Scrapped Shed is an interactive installation that was situated outdoors in Kassel’s Karlsaue Park. Housed within the body of a prefab summer cottage, the core of the work is a giant Scrapbook surrounded by audio-visual elements such as a guitar that is automatically strummed in response to visitors’ movements, miniature monitors playing back concert footage, and speakers. Other elements include a trailer car, boats, and material found on site, as well as the eponymous neon sign, reading mon cheri in Japanese katakana script, which Ohtake salvaged from a snack bar that went out of business in his hometown of Uwajima. Conceived in the wake of the devastating Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, the work also includes a cubic structure with steam rising from it (attached to its roof) that recalls the skeletal remains of the damaged reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. While the titular “self-portrait” suggests that the work has a biographical element, it is perhaps closer to a fictionalization of Ohtake’s response to the diverse images and associations stirred up by a cataclysmic event that revealed the ever-increasingly intricate ties between the individual pysche and mass media in the postinternet era.

2012

dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany

2013

Shinro Ohtake: NEWNEW, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan

2015

Books of Asia, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea

2019

Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future, JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong