Ko Nakajima is one of the pioneer Japanese artists of video art. After beginnings in animation video, he made use of new technologies to appropriate and develop different softwares that allowed him to create veritable visual collages in movement. Each work is the expression of a unified research, progressively unveiled in the process of discovery of a life’s oeuvre.

Mount Fuji dates from the year 1984, at a time when Nakajima had already affirmed his style of manipulating images, and had established his universe distinguished by elements of nature and infused with Oriental philosophy. This tape is emblematic of the researches he conducted thanks to the invention of the aniputer, a machine which allows one to distort, superpose and embed images with ease, created in collaboration with JVC’s research department. Against the rhythm of repetitive music, different images of Mount Fuji compose geometric structures forming a Rubik’s cube’s perspectival frame, cut through by photographs which regularly come and drift away before the spectator.

Mount Fuji is a highly mystical site in Japanese culture, a religious and national symbol. It is at the heart of numerous works, placing man in relation to a mountain’s ancientness and its fundamental ambiguity – the possibility of a volcanic eruption dwells within the impression of stability and permanence. Playing with static and flat images that cut across the screen, Nakajima brings to mind the tectonic drift of plates which could at any time erase the benign image of Mount Fuji.

If the effects beget an aesthetic that is a little old-world today (though very representative of the period), this video provides an account of artists’ capacity to appropriate technological innovations – to bring about them even, thus revolutionising the history of forms. It is an approach we find in the work of Chinese artist Cao Fei for example, whereby fantasy intrudes into reality through recourse to novel possibilities of digital animation. Nakajima is hence the precursor of an artistic practice that works hand in hand with industrial research.

Mathilde Roman

Translated by Yin Ker