Statement

“Unattained Landscape” is an exhibition that promotes art and cultural exchanges held within the Japan Foundation to ultimately reflect contemporary creation by reconsidering and questioning the islands of Japan as potential models for contemporary culture. How can this vast and dispersed land be home to a common culture? How might it invoke common sensations in those who visit? How does this inform judgment on communities, however scattered and fragmented, on a global scale?
“Unattained Landscape” challenges the archipelago – the land in its contemporary form, and whatever it means to belong to a community, including the conditions of formation and its relation to a territory. As nations are perpetually made or unmade, and as they subsequently mark territories with new physical boundaries, mental and temporal maps imperceptibly emerge to create invisible, discontinuous territories that transcend notions of a ‘nation’. These maps reveal an imaginary version of Japan; they convey desires and paradigms of a country represented not only by a group of cities, poetry, games or food, but by a fusion of fantasies invoked and inspired by Japanese and non-Japanese minds and films.
Artists invited to take part in the exhibition will contribute to opening new insights in an attempt to answer these questions.

The exhibition will feature the work of Japanese and international artists from multiple creative fields: visual art, graphic design, cartoon, literature, performance, sound and film. Ultimately, “Unattained Landscape” proposes an overlapping of skills, attitudes and disciplines that promotes a way beyond the repetitive format of traditional contemporary art exhibitions. This renewed curatorial approach functions as the best way of describing the hectic changes within Japanese identity, and it is a microcosm that illustrates worldwide changes in how global communities choose to conceive, represent and live life.