Yuji Hamada’s “Primal Mountain” was produced soon after the catastrophes of March 11, 2011. The lack of reliable information regarding these events in the region and the government’s response created an intellectual climate of outrage and a culture of doubt.
Hamada’s work relies on photography’s ability to persuade our senses into belief. A formation of tin foil into a vaguely reminiscent mountain-shape is enough to trigger the image of particular mountains in most minds. But what happens to this representation of reality if the artifact is a manipulated thing? Is the idea of a mountain no less true than the photograph of an actual mountain range?
Playing with these ideas can seem like a rhetorical machination but in the hands of Hamada, our awareness is directed toward the ideas and formations that we share communally and how, perhaps, these pre-conceived formations are pervasive and at work in many of our ideas of the world around us and our perception of it. —Ivan Vartanian