October 2024
VMAC Article
“Video is Vengeance and Victory of Vagina”: Radical Expressions in Early Women’s Video of Japan
Text: Cen Yuan
Men think: “I think, therefore I am.” I, a woman, feel: “I bleed, therefore I am.” Recently I’ve bled ten thousand feet of half-inch tape, every month. Man shoots me every night;… I can’t resist. I shoot him back in broad daylight with a vidicon or tivicon, taping in overexposure. Video is Vengeance and Victory of Vagina. [1]
In 1974, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gathered artists, journalists, and television producers and held the conference “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television”, intending to establish video as a new artistic category within contemporary art. [2] Among the various participants, one of the female pioneers from Japan Shigeko Kubota gave a forceful speech focusing on women’s practices in the U.S. and Japan. Specifically, in her opening remark cited above, she passionately described a feminised future of video, and her expression was strikingly radical—with an explicit analogy between video mechanics and women’s menstruation and a direct accusation of male dominance in the art field, suppressing women’s creativity.
In the early 1970s, many artists proactively envisioned new possibilities in art upon the invention of video and the subsequent rapid changes in technological conditions in art. Newly introduced to the medium of video, which by then had not yet developed a unified art -historical discourse, they explored the freedom of envisioning unconventional forms of engagement and expression. Women artists from Japan, who were then struggling to seek a female position within the male-dominated art scene, have notably added a corpus of radical takes in critically considering the impact and future of this new medium. Apart from Kubota, there were Fujiko Nakaya, Kyoko Michishita, and Mako Idemitsu, to name a few—who were also featured in Kubota’s speech and with whom she had “achieved lateral communication from friend to friend.” [3] Following Kubota’s remarks, this article will briefly revisit this historical moment through some of their creations, in which these women artists directly confronted the various norms in art, society, and even politics in radical ways. Of particular importance is the bursting creativity as they exerted their female positions in addressing diverse pressing contexts.
Primarily, in Kubota’s speech, she imagined female revenge against male dominance in art achieved through an exploration of video’s technical properties. This attention to the medium’s specific mechanics reflects in part the broader context of this early phase in video art history when many were seeking to demonstrate the various artistic particularities of this new technology. Yet notably, as Chris Meigh-Andrews has noted, these discussions went far beyond a modernist search for a “pure language of the medium.” [4] Rather, the 1970s witnessed such concerns shifting to a postmodernist critical paradigm that “favoured deconstruction,” leading to “an examination of the dominant representational practices and seeking to construct an oppositional practice.” [5]
The two videotapes Kubota produced before 1974, Europe in Half Inch a Day and An American Family (also titled Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky), are examples of this radicalisation of art at this historical moment. In both works, Kubota took on a countercultural stance, as she explained, “On these travels I made a videotape entitled ‘Europe in Half Inch a Day,’ a very different view of Europe than that presented in the best-selling traveller’s guidebook, ‘Europe on Five Dollars a Day.’ I made another tape, ‘An American Family,’ while living with a Navajo family on a reservation one summer. This too is made from a very different perspective than PBS’s ‘An American Family.’” [6] In Europe in Half Inch a Day, Kubota exerts the spontaneous and guerrilla nature of video to present a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the Parisian subcultural world, in which she directly points her lens at underground theatres, sexual performances, mysterious religious rituals, and anti-war demonstrations. These shots are further connected with Kubota’s visit to the tomb of Marcel Duchamp, the iconic figure of avant-garde movements and the art-historical hero of Kubota’s generation. As such, Kubota outlines a countercultural landscape in which video is also included. More boldly, in An American Family, Kubota displaces the middle-class and White-centric definition of American families in PBS’s reality show. Her personal video documentary is a woman-centred depiction focusing on a matrilineal family in Navajo on their long journey seeking water. The explicit depiction that does not evade any hardship and brutality during the journey is a celebration of female labour and their toughness. Moreover, Kubota’s employment of the colour synthesiser to merge her colourful self-portrait with the black-and-white footage of Navajo life further subverts the monoethnic implications of the original An American Family, imbuing the work with a globalist and multiculturalist vision that challenges dominant representations of American identity. Kubota’s voiceover for the work informs the audience that her first name “Shigeko” can mean “sister-in-law” in the Navajo language, which prompts the artist to declare “I am the sister-in-law of Navajo people.”
Like Kubota, Fujiko Nakaya’s early video experiments were grounded in an exploration of the medium’s technical capabilities. Similarly, she investigated new possible forms of expression within broader socio-political agendas, especially examining the potential use of video as a means of individual empowerment in activist contexts. Nakaya was one of the founding members of the earliest video collective pan, Video Hiroba. The collective was particularly keen on using video to radically revolutionise existing ways of communication during the rapid transformation of Japanese society. As another member Katsuhiro Yamaguchi wrote: “In cases where current television addresses social issues or current events, reporting methods and the broadcasting system don’t necessarily convey the content accurately, often presenting information in a cleaned-up, one-way state. In comparison, video would seem to create a place for more direct communication.” [7] Nakaya’s early experiments often situated video within actual radical contexts. For instance, her 1972 work Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary focuses on the protests revolving around the Minamata problem. Nakaya placed video monitors among the protesters and guided them to observe and reflect on the deeper meanings of their radical acts in real time. Her direct on-site intervention with video aimed to foster more dynamic and participatory modes of dialogue, through which to encourage more effective communication across various social sectors, both vertically and horizontally.
If the bold experiments of Kubota and Nakaya were more directed towards the larger art-historical and political concerns, videos of Kyoko Michishita and Mako Idemitsu look sharply into critical issues in women’s immediate living contexts. Both artists belong to a new generation of female creators encouraged by the feminist movements in the 1970s. Kyoko Michishita studied translation at the University of Wisconsin during the late 1960s, where she developed a keen interest in feminist ideas. Meanwhile, in the case of Idemitsu, she was then the wife of the painter Sam Francis and lived in Los Angeles, where she studied by herself filmmaking and engaged in Judy Chicago’s ground-breaking feminist art project Womanhouse as a documentary director. Their videos are highly theoretically informed and critically assess the social conditions of Japanese women.
The majority of Kyoko Michishita’s early videos were produced to rethink the definition of women’s roles within Japan’s patriarchal society, which were also part of her feminist Consciousness-Raising practice. It was a critical means employed among early feminist groups to reveal the various oppression under patriarchal mechanics in women’s personal everyday lives. Kyoko Michishita’s first video in 1974 Being Woman in Japan: Liberation within My Family documents such an occasion within the artist’s Japanese family. In the video, the elder sister of Michishita was awaiting recovery after brain surgery. In the hospital, the family gathered, upon which Michishita talked with each family member regarding the various roles her sister had taken as a woman in Japan. As their conversation proceeded, it was revealed how the position of her elder sister had been defined by family, which was essentially a patriarchal institution—as a wife and mother. Paying this brief revisit to her sister’s life, Michishita reflects upon how patriarchy in Japan has been depriving the vast possibilities that women could have possessed.
Similarly concerned with women’s roles in the domestic sphere, Idemitsu created psychological dramas that shed light on the schizophrenic mentality of Japanese women stressed out by patriarchal disciplines. Her 1978 work Another Day of a Housewife presents an uncanny domestic scene, pointing to how Japanese women were confined and alienated by the prescribed role of “housewives”. The video is a straightforward depiction of the day-to-day routine of a housewife in a middle-class family in the 1970s. Idemitsu places a video monitor in the background, which shows a close-up of the woman’s eyes. This unique monitor-in-monitor composition not only deconstructs the idea of representation, but Idemitsu also explores it as a metaphor for the mechanism of patriarchal discipline in constructing women’s “everyday life”. Furthermore, it transforms the seemingly objective observation into a contested psychological field for women’s self-scrutiny. The video eyes also represent the housewife’s inner self, quietly beholding herself mechanically and repetitively fulfilling her prescribed duties. The monitor as an industrial product also becomes a metaphor for the alienated status of the housewife, as even her inner self can only return in a dehumanised, disembodied form via video signals. This unique composition would be later called the “Mako style” and become a signature mannerism of Idemitsu’s video art.
It is also in Idemitsu’s works that one sees her radical critiques directed towards technology itself. The monitor-in-a-monitor composition characterising Another Day of a Housewife is more than a self-referential exploration of video-specific languages, but also diverts critical attention to technology’s social function, as Idemitsu views technology as a device perpetuating the tragedies of women within the patriarchal power structures of Japanese families.
A central theme across Idemitsu’s 1980s videos was to question the progressivist belief that technological advancement could improve life. In postwar Japan, this belief had been incorporated into the conception of the ideal middle-class home, where media technologies like television and video were seen as “home appliances” with the power to unite family bonds. In sharp contrast, Idemitsu’s videos present a different view of family life from this ideal. Idemitsu’s works are often set within highly (and sometimes excessively) technologised domestic spaces, depicting monstrous maternal figures obsessively replaying clips of their sons in childhood, preserved by VHS tapes (Hideo, It’s Me Mama, 1983), or becoming omnipresent televisual signals intruding on their daughters’ psychological space (Great Mother, 1983-1984). By showing how these female characters are driven to insanity within these seemingly “modern” and “progressive” technology-filled environments, Idemitsu poignantly overturns the fantasy of technological progress, portraying instead dark melodramas of Japanese women’s dilemmas.
Pushing Idemitsu’s radical expressions to the extreme is her 1989 work Kiyoko’s Situation, in which she confronts the violence of technology as an ideological apparatus imposed on women in the domestic sphere. Here intriguingly, the female protagonist Kiyoko’s struggle against patriarchy is visualised through her conflict with television. In the video, a gigantic television monitor dominates the centre of the living room, constantly brainwashing Kiyoko with patriarchal doctrines and triggering her precarious mentality. Throughout the video, Kiyoko struggles to destroy or throw over the device. Ultimately, failing to negate the menacing omnipresence of the television, Kiyoko commits suicide by climbing up to the monitor and hanging herself. This bold ending directly indicts the violence of patriarchy towards women, in which technology has played a complicit role.
What is also striking here is how Idemitsu subverts the liberalist myth of video as a personal medium through these discordant and somehow terrifying visions of technology. The history of early video art has been widely narrated as a discovery of the personal and the private, in which the power and authority of the public were deconstructed. In particular, accounts of women’s videos can easily fall under such a progressive and techno-determinist stance. Idemitsu’s works, which include video technology within the scope of critiques, are feminist reminders of the ingrained patriarchal violence within the newly discovered private visions. Overturning the aspiration for technological advancement, her videos narrate how women’s dilemmas have been repeating.
A recurring question in studies of the early history of women making videos is how far women went with the new technology and thus how revolutionary video could be in both socio-political and art-historical terms. Of particular importance was the examination of the role of video not only in art but also in the broader cultural landscape, political transformation, and social condition. This article only touches upon a brief corpus of concerns and approaches in the case of women artists from Japan at an early stage of video art. Yet I wish these examples could help illustrate a broader picture of the diverse radical attempts by women artists from Japan, through which one could further explore their navigation and challenge of the various limits in both art and society.
[1] Shigeko Kubota, “Women’s Video in the U.S. and Japan,” in The New Television: A Public/Private Art, ed. Douglas David and Allison Simmons (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1977), 97.
[2] Open Circuits Project Statement, undated, from Electronic Arts Intermix, https://www.eai.org/supporting-documents/384/w.1244.0.
[3] Kubota, “Women’s Video in the U.S. and Japan,” 100.
[4] Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 2nd ed. (New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 282.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Kubota, “Women’s Video in the U.S. and Japan,” 98.
[7] Yamaguchi Katsuhiro et al, “Communication, Not Expression: Do-It-Yourself Kit,” 1972, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan, 1945-1989, ed. Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 296.
(The views and opinions expressed in this article published are those of the author/s. They do not necessarily represent the views of VMAC.)
Artist Backstory
Old work sparkles in the dark
Text: Jess Lau
Translation: Phoebe Wong
A few minutes into the screening of the animation, the air-conditioning and ventilation in the screening room suddenly stopped, turning the place into an almost soundproof chamber, with only the projector still running; the charcoal black pastel on the right of the screen continued to rotate and shrink, and the image of the city on the left gradually emerged. However, the temperature in the room was rising, so I took the liberty of opening the door to let in some fresh air. Meanwhile, outside, people were starting to walk down the street because of the power outage, children were still playing, cars were starting up… The sounds of the neighbourhood drifted into the room, lending a new dimension to this otherwise silent animation.
This summer, Videotage brought two of my animations, The Fading Piece (2014) and Sparkling Fountain (2021), to the Arkipel International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in Jakarta. I was there to share my practice with the audience in a post-screening talk, and I am sure I was the one who got the most out of it. The audience’s feedback made me rethink my own creations. The Fading Piece, completed ten years ago, has been shown many times over the years as an installation in different spaces, but never as a film per se. It was hard for me to imagine a few dozen people crammed into a black room watching my animation for twenty minutes, with no sound, no editing, no characters, and no plot.
The production method for The Fading Piece, my first animation, was very simple: I used a black crayon to complete a line drawing of the cityscape of Kwun Tong, which was under redevelopment at the time, and then I compressed the drawing process into a single animation. For each stroke, I recorded the state of the crayon and the paper; I went back and forth between the camera and the paper until the crayon was completely used up, which took half a year. The consumption of the crayon reflected the time and energy I had put into it. The animation is finally presented as a two-channel video installation, the animation on the right screen is a black crayon that gets smaller and smaller, while the drawing on the left screen takes shape line by line.
For a long time, my video works have often been shown in gallery-like exhibition spaces, in which case it is necessary to consider how to achieve the sculptural qualities of the video, that insubstantial, empty object, such as the size of the screen, the material, the configuration of the space, the distance from the viewer, the height of the chairs… and even the position of the work’s caption… This is a tool (even if it is not the best way) to show the conceptual aspects of the work. In this way, the video is shown on a loop, and the audience can enter and leave at any time. This flexibility usually reassures me, and I naturally think that this is probably a better way to present my conceptual videos.
But when The Fading Piece was shown in a cinema, the temporal nature of the work was reinforced. The audience had to watch the work from beginning to end, experiencing the same long journey as I did; watching a blank sheet of paper turn black, a pastel fade into nothingness. The audience said they had become witnesses to this process of artistic labour. This witnessing seemed a better way to realise the very concept of my work, the transformation of energy, from crayon to paper, from real to virtual, from creator to audience. I once forgot that video is a time-based medium for which the cinema is a better place than an exhibition space. Showing The Fading Piece in a cinema can make it a brand new work, something I only realised ten years later.
In the Q&A session, Hafiz Rancajale, co-founder and artist of Arkipel, pointed out that both my animations were made using traditional and simple techniques, whereas The Fading Piece was made without a single cut, and that he felt this made the film a much stronger trace of the creator’s work. Image making has always been linked to technological innovation, from the invention of the negative to camcorders, Super 8, digital cameras, green-screen effects, computer animation of all kinds, 3D scanning, AI-generated works… We cannot talk about video art without mentioning them. As a creator, however, I am ignorant of these new technologies—they are all integrated into our lives, and the unknown makes me wary of using them as a tool in my own practice. As a personal preference, I am always attracted to simple and low-tech methods of image making; I do not see this as a limitation. I like the tangible handmade feel of it, as it retains a kind of human ‘clumsiness’ and allows the artist to emerge in a different guise.
Hsu Chia-Wei’s work Marshal Tie Jia: Turtle Island was also screened in the same programme. The video begins with an old man singing a folk song in a temple, but later, as the camera zooms out, the audience finally discovers that this is actually a green screen technique of filmmaking, and they could even see the audio tool, the camcorder… The audience laughs as the film not only exposes the illusions of technology but also demonstrates and restores the ‘reality’ of the scene, a simple, matter-of-fact approach to photography that provides a unique viewing experience for the audience.
Staff Pick
A Summary of the Articles on Videotage’s Special Screenings at ARKIPEL
ARKIPEL x Videotage – Special Screenings 特別放映會: ‘(maybe) somewhere to go’
Videotage presented two screenings at the ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in Indonesia on 27 and 30 August. Forum Lenteng, the organizer of the festival, wrote two articles covering the two screenings. This is a summary of the articles offering glimpses into the events:
In the first post-screening discussion, Jess Lau, one of the Hong Kong artists featured in the screening programme, shared the philosophy behind her work. She explained that every stroke of her pen and every visual element is filled with underlying meanings. For instance, stars symbolize hidden “hopes, dreams, and desires”, while pairing the sounds of a handmade music box with the animation creates an intimate feeling. Despite the power outage during the first screening session, the participants remained engaged in the discussion. Holding up their smartphone flashlights, they brought a “warm, cinematic ambience” to the scene.
Meanwhile, fellow Hong Kong artist Yuen Nga Chi detailed her journey in creating Mui and Monuments Flipper, Ada and Honey Chapter 1: Ada during the second discussion. The former stemmed from the artist’s confusion between reality and the dream space, which was tested through pain. As a three-channel video that juxtaposes different planes of time and space, the latter was inspired by Yuen’s reflections on animals with limited living space when she worked in Ocean Park. As humans move from land to sea and validate their intrusions, the Chinese white dolphins are forced to migrate further and further away. How far can they go?
Detailed summaries of the two screening sessions are available on ARKIPEL’s official website for interested readers.
Video Review
Suet-Sin’s Sisters by Yau Ching, 1999
Selected and reviewed by Iris Tam (Intern)
Suet-Sin’s Sisters was created by Yau Ching in 1999. The eight-minute video features an interview with two lesbians talking about their life stories, their views on love, and the difficulties they faced.
At a time when homosexuality was not a topic that could be freely discussed in everyday life and the general public had little knowledge of the subject, the artist employed non-mainstream techniques and made use of readily available songs and scenes from Cantonese operas to give the audience a basic understanding and awareness of lesbianism.
In the video, the interview is interspersed with footage of the famous cross-dressing Cantonese opera actress Yam Kim Fai and her co-star Pak Suet Sin, as well as songs by Teresa Teng, the Taiwanese diva of lyrical songs. Through the interviewees’ own accounts and examples of other public figures, the work gently and rationally reflects on the shortcomings in the protection of women’s rights in Hong Kong society, conveying hopes that society can accept and respect the lesbian community.
About VMAC Newsletter
VMAC, Videotage’s collection of video and media arts, is a witness to the development of video and media culture in Hong Kong over the past 35 years. Featuring artists from varied backgrounds, VMAC covers diverse genres including shorts, video essays, experimental films and animations. VMAC Newsletter, published on a bi-monthly basis, provides an up-to-date conversation on media arts and their preservation while highlighting the collection and its contextual materials.