Ron Mueck at Mori Art Museum Exhibition Review

By Tom Baker

What are they thinking about? That woman lying in bed with her fingertips pensively on her cheek. That man in a boat, leaning to one side, peering ahead. That dispirited angel, slouching on a stool.

Each of these figures is the subject of a startlingly realistic sculpture by U.K.-based Australian artist Ron Mueck. They are part of a major exhibition of 11 of his works, presented in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, which runs through Sept. 23 at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo.

Some of the sculptures seem to have begun with Mueck himself wondering what people were thinking. For example, he once noticed a woman with a baby waiting at an intersection near his studio, her arms weighed down with grocery bags. According to the exhibition catalog, he “sketched her on the back of a parking ticket.” This was the starting point for the sculpture “Woman with Shopping” (2013), in which the baby, bundled up inside the woman’s coat, looks up at her face while the woman stares somewhere ahead with tired eyes.

“I don’t feel Ron is telling us what they were thinking,” longtime Mueck collaborator Charlie Clarke, one of the show’s curators, said in a Japan News interview. “He invites us to think for ourselves. He’s recognizing a moment that seems to have some poignance that would provide an opportunity for people to stop and think … moments that otherwise just might pass by.”

It’s up to you, the viewer, to use your own imagination and experience to supply the figures’ stories.