The Syntactical Impossibility of Approaching with a Pure Heart

This research explores a priori knowledge systems, encounters with the unexpected, and the inevitable impossibilities of reconciling representation, experience and expectation. The specific concern is the notion of a structural impossibility in the encounter with the distant, foreign, or other - explored through the image of Mount Fuji as an exemplar, its iconic status always preceding any actual encounter with it. This work develops Tan’s research interests, combining visual anthropology with critical theory, in the field of transnational dislocations, ‘discoveries’, epistemologies of differentiation, and the methodologies of quotation and citation. The approach is extended through processes of ‘crowd sourcing’ (soliciting images via the internet) and the collation of numerous visual instances of the representation of the iconic site. The research articulates the oscillating position between Japan (represented by the collective imaginings in the plethora of images of Mount Fuji) as Barthes’s empty sign, and its loaded political/cultural signification; bringing doubt to the possibility of either manifestation. The resulting exhibition confronts the spectator with this plethora through diverse forms, including 9 video works, several hundred donated drawn images, composite light-box images, viewing mechanisms, and an LED sign text work. The critical position developed in the research is articulated and extended through the formal construction of the viewers’ experience. The research was pursued through a two-month residency in Yokohama at the invitation of /Slab, University of Sunderland and BankART, Yokohama - developed as an engagement with the issues surrounding the 150-year celebrations of Japan-UK diplomatic relations.