"Memory does not belong to the past; it is the continuous present and future." Artist Kimio Tsuchiya's words speak volumes about "Plastic Memories — to illuminate 'now,' " currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Her work "Fragments of the Moon" (2004) features old bits of chipped pottery assembled in the shape of a crescent to portray the waxing and waning of the moon. Divorced from their previous histories and original uses, the ceramics are reconfigured into an artwork that shows the universal passage of time.

The first in a series of themed exhibitions that draw from the museum's vast collection, "Plastic Memories" spans two floors with contemporary art in a wide range of mediums. Other artists represented also detach memories from "place and time," using them as inspirational crude ores, which are recast into forms that make us contemplate our relationship to today's world.

Enclosed in a cocoon-like space enshrouded in darkness, Fuyuki Yamakawa's "The Voiceover" (1997-2008) engages the viewer with a carefully orchestrated interplay of video clips and fragments of sound. Yamakawa, a Britain-born artist and musician, uses retro TV sets and a large video projection to display fleeting moments of archive material, while viewers listen to a diary-like voiceover. The audio musings on everyday life follow the speaker's career as a news reporter, up until his untimely death. The speaker, it emerges, is actually the artists' father, and the work transforms into a poignant testimony to a deceased parent.

Mortality is also confronted in "Archives of the Dead Swiss" (1990), with French artist Christian Boltanski's stark wall of rusting metal tins plastered with newspaper cutouts of anonymous faces. On first glance the piece appears to be an overt reference to the Holocaust, but it subverts the viewer's expectation when on closer inspection, the photographs turn out to be from obituary notices of ordinary people. While Yamakawa takes personal history and offers it as a communal "rebirth," Boltanski focuses on the finality of death, an inevitablity regardless of history.

In contrast, a video work by Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul resists conventional notions of "history," proffering delicate drifting imagery of the worn-out interior of a hotel room's inhabitation. "Emerald" (2007) subsequently presents a woman's spoken account of lost love, dreams and boisterous behavior, while onscreen, floating faces lie on pillows, feathery specks converge and other supernatural events unfold. Evoking memory through architecture, Weerasethakul embodies the spirit of a previous occupant who, through his work, defies space and time.

Presenting an exhibition based on a museum's collection does have its strengths, but it also has limitations. Though it is understandably tricky to balance showcasing an oeuvre while sticking to a specific theme, a few of the curatorial desicions are questionable.

The multiple drawings of Japanese artist Shunsuke Matsumoto, for example, present scenes of everyday life in wartime Japan, which the museum argues preserves the "reality" of an urban landscape that is later destroyed by World War II. This seems tenuous considering the drawings are, in fact, the artist's preparatory sketches for painting works.

An overwhelming amount of wall-mounted work on the second floor, too, lacks the curatorial dynamism and lucid synergy found between the works on the first floor, while two artists, Tomio Miki and Yuki Kimura, lack the space and prominence that they truly deserve.

All this, however, shouldn't detract attention from Yukinori Maeda's "Universal Love" (2009), which brings "Plastic Memories" to an intriguing close. Featuring a ramshackle construction of wood, semitransparent colored plastics and mirrors, Maeda strives to re-create the emotion of a personal experience. Ethereal sound and light help the viewer ascend into a metaphysical state, beyond space and time and into a purified memory.

Maeda's installation is an effective summation of the exhibition. It is, after all, only the present that can affirm one's consciousness. But even this is paradoxical: The present is forever informed by the past in creating a possible future. "Plastic Memories" ultimately reveals the fragility of humanity. Existence, like a moment, is fleeting.

"Plastic Memories — to illuminate 'now' " at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo runs till June 20; admission ¥500; open 10 a.m.-6 p.m., closed Mon. For more information, visit www.mot-art-museum.jp