Artist Statement →
The work explores the question of how clichés affect the communication of cultures. In a concentrated and intuitive process, I made silhouettes from writing paper - without preliminary drawing and without removing the cutter - and then photographed them on colored cardboard. In this auto reflexive process, my own ideas, projections and assumptions of Japan developed into pictogram-like "motifs" with an associative surplus. The result is a kind of Rorschach test of a self-referential cultural iconography in which the title of the work provides the associative framework. The silhouettes turn into a projection screen and create a basis for associations, attributions and stereotypes of Japan. Such as Handicraft, Paper, Manga, Samurai, Mifune and Kitano, that result in a "Japan feeling“. It is the unmasking of an individual cultural appropriation - in the form of a handmade mimesis with excerpts of an unknown strangeness - in a globality conveyed by the media.
