National Identity at Arakawa and Gins' Site of Reversible Destiny

Abstract

This paper examines the manipulation of forms of the traditional Japanese stroll garden at Site of Reversible Destiny, a tourist park designed by the New Yorkbased collaborators Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Landscape and its representations are central to the construction of national identity in Japan since the cultural distinctiveness of the Japanese people has been argued to rest on their unique relationship to nature and the country’s idiosyncratic geography. The stroll garden of the larger estates and palaces of the Edo period (1615–1867) developed out of earlier temple gardens and most public parks in contemporary Japan are in the grounds of these historic sites or reproduce their forms. Site of Reversible Destiny works knowingly with, and against, this tradition. Arakawa & Gins use the model of the stroll garden towards an interrogation of national identity. Neither nostalgic nor patriotic, Site of Reversible Destiny constitutes a sustained meditation upon the instability of Japanese national identity, an instability to which it actively contributes. Through tactics of inversion, mimicry, interruption and the inclusion of text, ruins and maps of the Japanese archipelago and cities abroad, the artists are able to render ambiguous issues of nationality for both local and foreign visitors.