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Cliffhanger on Fuji
Kaori Nakajima´s pictures and installations deal with questions of cultural identity.
For example, Mount Fuji, the well known ikon of Japanese national awareness,
appears in her lithographs and collages. Kaori Nakajima transfers such frequently
connoted objects with recall value in new coherences, which are loose, incoherent
and open. Often her pictorial narratives follow the principles of collages and montages.
The templates are taken from books, art catalogues or the internet. Kaori Nakajima detaches
certain elements or figures from their context and integrates them in a new setting.
In various works figures emerge taken from a book about medieval torture. Kaori Nakajima
reduces these fragments so much, that we can hardly divine their initial context and meaning.
Partially the results tilt to the point, that painfully tormented people appear to have a free
posture and peaceful expression. This begs the question: how reliable is an image?
Kaori Nakajima examines the point of sudden change of the possibilities of meaning,
thus the point, in which there is no more reliance in the message of the picture, or in which
our perceptions assume an independent reality. Hence reality and fiction cross each other
in Kaori Nakajima's pictures. Whereas in the paintings it is often about dreamlike states,
the collages come alive through illusionary moments and repeal of spatiality.
Art Historian and Cultural Journalist lives and works in Munich