Hiroshi McDonald Mori | Oolong Gallery

Hiroshi McDonald Mori (b. La Jolla, California) is a conceptual artist working in sculpture, photography, installation, and performance. MFA with Honors, Bard College (2014); BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2003); Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010). Raised between Tokyo and California, he spent thirteen years in Berlin before returning to San Diego in 2020. Mori's practice investigates hybrid cultural identity, memory, and displacement through material processes including salt printing—the 19th-century photographic technique—where he mixes his own chemistry, creating site-specific results that vary with water composition, light, and weather.Exhibitions include Athens Biennale, Kiev Biennale, Studio Museum Harlem, Boston ICA, Performa, Warhol Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art Tokyo, Museum of Modern Art Yerevan, Künstlerverein Malkasten, DD55, and Oolong Gallery. Faculty at Bard College Berlin (2018), Jan Van Eyck Academie (2017), and choir director (since 2022). Collections include Aram Khachaturian Museum (Yerevan), Vito Leccese, Huma Bhabha & Jason Fox, Paul Pfeiffer, Nan Goldin, Christine Sun Kim, Rosemary Trockel & Curtis Anderson, and Leiko Ikemura & Philipp von Matt.Mori's work engages post-war migration narratives alongside digital world-perspectives through ambivalence and metamorphosis. His installation Different Trains (2015)—carved limestone blocks people could walk upon—addresses intergenerational displacement, literally splitting the earth with feathers and wedges. Jet Lag (2017) introduced carved limestone fixed under salt and albumin prints juxtaposed against its mirror image, a 3-D print to observe what is lost and what is gleaned, instantly filtered through digital transmogrification. Drawing from Gutai, Bauhaus, Japanese iitoko-dori (embracing contradiction), and sprezzatura (studied nonchalance), his site-specific processes connect to broader contemporary discourses on place and identity. Positioned alongside Do Ho Suh and Yto Barrada, Mori creates what scholar T.J. Demos calls "the migrant image"—work that embodies rather than represents contemporary displacement, extending phenomenological and post-minimalist traditions through rigorous material inquiry.