The Syntactical Impossibility of Approaching with a Pure Heart, 2008
Multiple installation. Work commissioned by: /slab , Universit y of Sunderland , Northern Galler y of Contemporary Art , Bank ART 1929
Comprising an array of different views of Mount Fuji, Erika Tan’s complex multi-part installation is an engaging and evocative portrait of Japan’s most iconic mountain, as well as a wider meditation on the difficulties, and the vagaries, of representation. There is a popular story that Fuji only fully reveals itself to someone approaching with a ‘pure heart’. Orbiting around the mountain, and tracing its repeated outline in people’s spur-of-the moment drawings, Tan assembles an
inventory of received impressions, with the only ‘live’ video of
the mountain, instructively, lost in a blanket of fog.
