Idemistu Mako – Asian Docs

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 5 – The Past Ahead

This is the last entry in my coverage of the exhibition (here Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4)

The retrospective Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made, currently on view at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (July-September 2026), is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever devoted to the pioneering video artist and filmmaker. Bringing together films, video works, installations, and archival materials, it offers an unprecedented overview of more than five decades of Idemitsu’s artistic practice, tracing the evolution of a body of work that has consistently explored gender, domesticity, motherhood, and the mediated construction of female identity, especially in Japan.
I visited the exhibition, which also featured special screenings of Idemitsu’s works, over two days in July, immersing myself completely in her world. It was one of the most extraordinary artistic experiences I’ve had in 2026, an aesthetic revelation that continues to resonate within me.
From the museum’s homepage:

Idemitsu Mako (b. 1940) is a pioneering artist in the fields of experimental film and video art in Japan. After spending time in the United States during the 1960s, she began creating works that explored themes such as the lives of women, family, and the relationship between media and society, using film and early video as her mediums. Her video works from the 1970s onwards in
particular incorporate the narrative techniques of television melodramas to depict themes such as mother-child relationships, the dynamics of marriage, and women’s social roles from a unique perspective. In recent years, as the global conversation surrounding gender and the body continues
to grow, her practice has received renewed attention.
The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum acquired Idemitsu Mako’s complete film and video works, as well as her major installation pieces, between 2017 and 2018. This large-scale retrospective offers a comprehensive overview of Idemitsu’s artistic practice, including works that are being exhibited for
the first time since their acquisition by the museum. A total of 45 works, including those in the museum’s collection, will be presented through exhibitions and screenings.

As a future reference for myself and for anyone who might stumble upon this page, I’ll be publishing my notes on every work I saw during my two-day stay in Tokyo. They’re rough impressions rather than finished reviews, but I hope they’ll prove useful, whether as a personal archive or for readers interested in Idemitsu remarkable body of work.
Hopefully I longer piece will eventually emerge from this work in progress.(Works are listed in the order I saw them)

The Past Ahead (2004)
I chose to end my coverage with this installation partly because it was located towards the end of the exhibition, but also because it was the work that resonated with me the most. Its compelling formal structure, the themes it explores, and the way it brings Idemitsu’s career full circle make it a fitting culmination of her artistic journey.
The Past Ahead consists of two screens positioned some distance from one another. The screen closest to the viewer is transparent, allowing the eye to see through it to the second screen in the background. The result is a double exposure effect done in a physical space, a kind of three-dimensional superimposition.
In addition to the two screens, the images projected onto the transparent screen are also cast onto the floor in the space between the two projections (see the photo above).

The screen in the foreground presents photographs and other images of Idemitsu’s family from the wartime years, during the early 1940s, while the screen behind it projects footage documenting the Japanese Empire’s military campaigns during the same period. Images of corpses, warships firing their guns, and aircraft carrying war across Asia are interwoven with excerpts from other films. Among them, I recognized scenes from Kami Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers, as well as clips from a documentary about the so-called “comfort women,” although I cannot recall the title.

If video and video art, as we have seen in the previous entries, possess the ability to capture and generate multiple temporalities, and if Idemitsu made full use of these possibilities throughout her works of the 1980s and 1990s, then this installation represents the culmination of her exploration of interweaving temporal flows.
The key innovation Idemitsu introduces here is the incorporation of personal material, although this was already present, to some extent, in her earlier installation Real? Motherhood. Above all, however, the work offers a fierce critique of what her family, and her father in particular, represented within a Japanese society structured around patriarchal authority. It is worth remembering that Mako’s father, Sazō, in 1911 founded Idemitsu Kōsan, currently the second-largest petroleum company in Japan. He was a dominating and controlling figure and when his daughter decided to pursue a career in the arts and marry in the United States, he disowned her.

The problematic relationship with her father runs throughout Idemitsu’s career, but what distinguishes The Past Ahead is the way his figure is elevated into a symbol of patriarchy, male supremacy, and its connection to the violence of war and imperialism. The horrors of war and the violence perpetrated by the state, the artist seems to suggest, have their origins in the familial nucleus itself, they are already embedded in the very structure of the “traditional” family.

The effect of these two worlds, these two temporalities, overlapping before our eyes is mesmerizing. On one screen, we see the peaceful lives of Idemitsu’s family; on the other, the horrors produced by the imperial machine operating at full force. The contrast speaks of class divide, privilege, sexism, oligarchic power, and the exploitation of the most vulnerable. It evokes a past that, as the title suggests, is very much still ahead of us.

This contrast is amplified by the zooms into the family photographs, but also by the subtle movement of the images themselves, as if the screen were a curtain stirred by the wind. In some sections, the photographs drift out of focus, almost guiding our gaze toward the second screen behind them.

The complex sonic landscape, composed of two channels, is another of the main reasons why The Past Ahead is such a powerful and affecting work. The images on the first screen are accompanied by soft, ambient-like music, while those projected on the second screen are paired with static noise and voices of military personnel, often distorted and slowed down to create an even more unsettling effect.
終

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 4

Continuing my articles about the exhibition, Part 4 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here)

Part 4

“My 16 mm works are about creating another world to escape the rigid routine of daily life. Even now, film retains something of that quality, whereas video is a reflection of everyday reality. These two mediums exist as completely distinct entities. When I shoot on film, I want to detach myself from daily life and capture images that are incredibly beautiful. I actually love these kinds of films. For me, film and video stand clearly apart from each other.”
Interview with Idemitsu Mako The Complete Works of Idemitsu Mako, 1970-1996, Pandora, 1996, p. 21

Shodows Part 1 (1980) video
This work marks a pivotal moment in Mako Idemitsu’s career, as it was the first collaboration with Michael Goldberg, a Canadian videomaker based in Japan who would serve as cinematographer on many of her video works throughout the 1980s and beyond.
We are in the world of fashion, and a woman is seen discussing her latest work with a male journalist, while a monitor display other conversations unfolding simultaneously. The sound moves freely from one reality to the other.
As in many of Idemitsu’s videos, the work draws on a Jungian concept—in this case, the shadow, the hidden and often repressed dimension of female subjectivity.
Perhaps more explicitly than in her other works, it becomes clear how the stories in the monitors and those outside (but the is no really inside and outside!) are different realities, different temporalities/fluxes. But there’s no real temporality vs fake temporality, or borrowing from the language of perspectivism, each monitor does not offer a point of view on reality; instead, it constitutes a real point of view. As the exhibition catalogue notes, the work was also strongly influenced by the pervasive presence of television in the daily lives of Japanese housewives.

Kiyoko’s Situation (1989) video
Almost a decade after Shadows Part 1, Kiyoko’s Situation returns to Idemitsu’s exploration of women artists in contemporary Japanese society. The protagonist is a woman who aspires to become a painter, but after marrying under pressure from her parents, her ambitions are gradually crushed by the domestic role she is expected to fulfill as a housewife.
The scenes unfolding inside the monitors are more imposing and menacing than in Idemitsu’s earlier videos, particularly when Kiyoko’s parents perform their self-appointed “duty” as guardians of her life. Her husband is equally violent and insensitive, “You are half a woman if you don’t give birth.” Kiyoko, in turn, confesses, “Inside me there’s another me who becomes repressed by me becoming a mother and wife.” At one point, a vase is shattered, and Kiyoko desperately attempts to piece it back together: a metaphor for her effort to reconstruct both her dreams and the self she had hoped to become. The work culminates in a devastating ending, with Kiyoko hanging herself, using a television monitor as a footstool. Undoubtedly one of Idemitsu’s darkest reflections on the limited freedom afforded to women, especially women artists, within Japanese society and the traditional family structure.
Formally, the texture of the images appears more refined and polished than in the earlier works, possibly reflecting improvements in the video equipment used. Once again, television monitors are employed horizontally as tables, an especially effective visual device. The interplay between multiple monitors is more sophisticated, while both the set design and the interaction between performers and monitors are more elaborate than in Idemitsu’s previous works. The voices and overall soundscape are more carefully constructed.
According to the exhibition catalogue, Kiyoko’s Situation was inspired not only by Idemitsu’s own experiences but also by the lives of the artists Takamura Kōtarō and Takamura Chieko. The work is dedicated to Idemitsu’s older sister, who died young in Paris while pursuing her own dream of becoming a painter.

Kae, Act Like a Girl! (1996) video
The preoccupation with the place of women artists in society reaches its culmination in this work. In many ways, it is Idemitsu’s most accomplished video: it is longer, makes use of projections as well as television monitors, features more professional acting, and has more elaborate sets. Its narrative follows a woman artist who gradually frees herself from social pressures and the web of expectations surrounding her, with the crucial support of her mother.
Yet, for me, it is less impactful than her earlier works from the 1980s that deal with similar themes. Gone, for the most part, is the satirical, almost surreal quality that permeates those videos, while the greater aesthetic refinement of this work, in my opinion, slightly weakens its overall impact. Maybe it was just fatigue after two days of immersion in her video-world.
On the other hand, I found the work’s performative quality and the inclusion of installations refreshing, and it probably marks a turning point in Idemitsu’s career, as new technologies and artistic possibilities opened up fresh path of exploration.

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 3

Continuing my articles about the exhibition, Part 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

Part 3

Yoji, What’s Wrong With You? (1987) video
Of of Idemitsu’s best works. A Brechtian family psychodrama where absurdity reigns. Television screens function as magnifying lenses, enlarging and externalising the protagonists’ inner lives. The relationship between mother and son unfolds in a surreal, almost comical, and at times perverse register (as in the scene where the mother gazes at a monitor showing her son’s naked body), while the characters speak largely through clichés and stock phrases.
While the central narrative revolves around a mother struggling with the gradual loss of her connection to her son, and the prospect of old age, the simple mise-en-scène, and especially the pervasive presence of television screens (here arranged in more playful and unconventional ways than in Idemitsu’s earlier works) also turns the video into an almost X-ray-like examination and deconstruction of the social roles and expectations internalised by women in Japanese society.
Television monitors as a Cronenbergian and Ballardian materialization women’s dreams, memories, unrealized aspirations, fears, and desires…

Grandmother, Mother, Daughter (1976) was displayed at the exhibition entrance on three TV monitors stacked in a column. In the piece, Idemitsu’s grandmother, mother, and daughter each appears in one screen with several packs of cigarettes, improvising and playfully interacting with them.
Women’s labor as captured and controlled by cameras?
First installation by Idemitsu and possibly the first instance in which she used monitors inside the frame, at least the first on video.

Animus Part 2 (1982) video
Another work inspired by Idemitsu’s fascination with women performing on stage. This time, Neo-Dada artist Kishimoto Sayako performs Messenger from Hell in Idemitsu’s living room. Over the footage, the filmmaker overlays an image of a pantomime figure in a yellow suit, and an oversized face. The work also includes English narration that does not fully translate Kishimoto’s words and carries a slightly ironic tone.
Kishimoto’s fierce performance brought to mind the avant-garde theater of the 1970s. The title, Animus, refers to the Jungian concept of the masculine side of the female psyche. Kishimoto was a fascinating artist.

Make Up (1978) video
Idemitsu is doing her make-up and uses a monitor as a mirrow.
Video as a make-up, a distortion, but also a revealing tool for self-awareness, and at the same time anticipating today’s obsession with one’s own image as continuosly reflected by contemporary mediascape (smartphone’s selfies, social media, etc.)

At Yukigawa 3 (1979) 16mm
Everyday scenes of Idemitsu’s mother and the artist herself are intercut with images of the gardens surrounding their houses in Yukigaya and Aobadai, accompanied by Chopin piano music.
The editing is fast, alternating between interior spaces, where the mother sits at a table eating and drinking, and shots of trees gently swaying in the garden. Occasionally, the voices of children can be heard in the background.

Housewives and a Day (1979) video
This was one of the highlights of the exhibition for me. While extremely simple in both structure and execution, it gradually acquires new layers of meaning as it unfolds.
Four housewives, living in Idemitsu’s neighbourhood, gather around a table with a floor plan of a typical house placed in front of them. Using the map as a guide, they reconstruct their daily routine, recalling what they did and where they went the previous day.
Through this simple setup, the women trace their movements around the house while chatting freely and cheerfully about yesterday’s chores, often struggling to remember the exact sequence of their actions. At a certain point, the floor plan is replaced by a map of the surrounding neighbourhood as they describe going grocery shopping, picking up their children from school, returning home, and heading back out again to run more errands.
Beyond documenting their routines and movements, the video creates an opportunity for these women to talk about their everyday lives and give voice to experiences that usually remain invisible or unspoken. As the work progresses, it increasingly becomes a space for sharing and solidarity among housewives (it should be noted that the women all appear to belong to the middle class). The exhibition catalogue describes the work as an experiment reminiscent of sandplay therapy, one that gradually fostered greater self-awareness among the four participants.
The use of video technology also plays a crucial role in shaping the work. If I’m not mistaken, the piece consists of a single continuous take, or perhaps just two, and this technical choice informs both its aesthetic and the way its themes emerge.

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 2

Continuing my articles about the exhibition, Part 2 (Part 1 here)

Part 2

Women (1977) video
The work was presented as a six-monitor installation, arranged in two vertical columns of three monitors each. According to the exhibition catalogue:
“Idemitsu visited ‘Hoki-boshi’, a space for women, and asked four women involved in the women’s liberation movement to participate in this work. She gave each of them a video camera and shot them as they used those cameras to go about their own filming. Idemitsu also screened the footage shot by these four women and the footage she had filmed on two monitors at her home, and watched it together with the participants, a process that she also filmed. In the exhibition, these three types of footage were shown on a total of six monitors. This installation was created for a solo exhibition at the Shirakaba Gallery in Ginza; currently, only the tapes for two of the six monitors survive.”

Emotional Volatility About My Father (1981) 16mm
Showed on video. Idemitsu’s father, who disowned his daugher when she got married in the U.S., died in 1981. This work is a reaction to th epassing of the man: a doll born from a bamboo (Kaguya hime, but it’s Mako herslef?), firstly covered in petals, and later in pieces of raw meat…oppression by her father?

*
Play and Capriciousness (1984) 16mm
Images of interior spaces: chairs, sofas, flowers, blades of light projected onto walls, plants in the gardens, everything bathed in a winterly twilight. These images are interspersed with words by Idemitsu herself about the children she left in America after her divorce in 1981.
Melancholic in tone this is very distant from her experimentations on video, and the angry and sarcastic tone she is more famous for in this period. Nonetheless, Play and Capriciousness is one of her most affective films….there is no sounds just silence and soothing images broken very seldom by Idemitsu words, almost whispered…words about families living with kids in her neighbourhood…people forming new families…in a way this film is a confession, a realization that, with her children becoming independent and going far away, a new phase of her life has begun. As the exhibition catalogue notes, it was precisely after her separation from her husband (she would later remarry) and her children’s departure that Idemitsu’s artistic output increased dramatically.

*
Whispering Light (1985) 16mm
Follows a similar structure and emotional register to Play and Capriciousness, this time as an elegiac tribute to Idemitsu’s mother, who had recently passed away.
Once again, images of nature, green landscapes, trees, and foliage, are interwoven with Idemitsu’s own words. For me though, the film is somewhat less powerful than the previous, perhaps due to the use of sound. While Play and Capriciousness gained much of its emotional force from its almost absolute silence and the sole presence of Idemitsu’s voice, Whispering Light introduces a more cacophonous, experimental soundscape that often dominates the moments when narration is absent that breaks, for me, the fluidity of the piece.
That being said, the passages in which Idemitsu recalls her mother are deeply moving: Idemitsu recalls for instance how her mother wanted to learn English and play golf, but that her father never allowed her to do so; or how, after his death, she remained alone in the large living room, sitting quietly in a corner.

The Marriage of Yasushi (1986) video
“We men are who made Japan great.” Following the Great Mother trilogy, Idemitsu continued to dissect and ridicule the tectonic plates underlying Japanese society through her “Jungian dramas”.
In The Marriage of Yasushi, the complex psychological and social dynamics surrounding family, gender, and power are pushed to an even more exaggerated and theatrical extreme.
The relationship between mother and son reaches new heights, largely thanks to Ozawa’s remarkable performance in the role of the mother. Funny, excessive, and at times unsettling, she smiles almost constantly, with a grin that reveals her delight whenever she can reclaim her son’s attention and possess him exclusively. The character becomes both absurd and frightening, embodying the emotional control and unconscious desires that Idemitsu often explored through her maternal figures.
The other central configurations — mother, son, father, and husband — are perhaps more bitter and strained than ever before.
One of Idemitsu’s most accomplished works from this period, The Marriage of Yasushi is also among her most carefully written and structurally fascinating pieces, especially for the use of sound in relation with her signature mark, the monitors. Again, what we see inside these screens are different temporalities of the protagonists and of the lives of others, but what really takes things to another level here is the sound editing. Idemitsu constantly shifts between the conversations happening inside the monitors and those taking place outside them, blurring the boundaries between different times and spaces.

* images are from the artist’s official homepage

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 1

Part 1

Another Day of a Housewife (1977) Video
Presented on a big television, this is the work that opens the exhibition.
This early video observes the everyday routines of a housewife—played by Idemitsu herself—through a series of long, static takes. Waking up, cooking, washing the dishes, grocery shopping, hanging laundry, calling friends on the phone. Throughout the film, a giant eye—again, the filmmaker’s own—repeatedly appears on a television monitor, silently watching the protagonist.
The constant presence of this eye is deeply unsettling. It evokes the omnipresence of the media, but even more powerfully, especially in the film’s darker, more intimate scenes, it comes to embody the internalized gaze of society: an apparatus of self-surveillance through which the protagonist judges and disciplines herself. The eye is at once external and internal, suggesting that social expectations have become inseparable from the housewife’s own consciousness.
Although this is not the first work in which Idemitsu incorporates television monitors, Grandmother, Mother, Daughter (1976) is probably the one, it is perhaps the first in which they function as a channel and window to the protagonists’ inner world. This formal device would become increasingly central to her work throughout the 1980s, eventually evolving into one of the defining features of her visual language, often referred to as the “Mako Style.”

Woman’s House (1972) 16mm
First work in 16mm by Idemitsu, the film is the recording, a re-composition of Womanhouse, an exhibition conceived by Judy Chicago and Mirian Schapiro at the California Instutite of Arts in 1971.
Small objects, clothes, interiors of a room, curtains, dolls, everything bathed in bright light. The screen is saturated with white from the very first shot. Surreal: fake breast cover the ceiling and walls, later giving way to sunny-side-up eggs.

What a Woman Made (1973) video
Static white sceen with a voice talking on it, the topic is gender roles for children as expected and codified in Japanese society. The image on screen is out of focus, abstract-like, and only toward the end does it gradually come into focus, revealing a tampon swirling in a toilet bowl. Idemitsu’s first significant work, also from a feminist point of view.

Great Mother (Harumi) (1983) video
Great Mother (YUMIKO) (1984) video
Great Mother (Sachiko) (1984)
Trilogy inspired by the Jungian concept of the “Great Mother”.
The relationship between mother and daughter varied in each work, but it’s alway excessive in hate or love.
The rebellious girl in the seond part seems to represent Idemitsu herself, who grew up in an affluent and powerful family.
In the last segment the mother/daughter relationship it’s not only very strong, but also a necessary shield, a safe space, against the violence, physical and mental, perpetrated daily by the husband (another vile male figure in the Idemitsu’s universe). Of the three the last is perhaps the nastiest in relation to the position and role played by the man, who is a representation of the alpha male/Japan/masculinity embedded in Japanese society.
Worth noting: in the last video, the television monitor is used also horizontally, as a table.
What is most astonishing here is the way the television monitors function not only as a means of materializing Jungian archetypes, but also of introducing multiple temporalities. They become windows onto the past or onto moments from another person’s life, collapsing different psychological and temporal dimensions into the same video space (“video is time” as Nam June Paik has stated and Maurizio Lazzarato expanded upon).

At Santa Monica 3 (1975) 16mm
Black-and-white silhouettes, the sun slowly setting, shifting patterns of light and shadow, reflections in constant motion. Accompanied by music by John Cage “String Quartet in Four Parts”, the film unfolds as an impressionistic vision of her house in Santa Monica and surroundings, where Idemitsu lived for many years. Probably the best work of her first period (in 16mm), at least amongst the ones I’ve seen.

Next (1973) 16mm
Single channel video form the original 16mm, Next collects together several works by artist CIBA: colorful geometrical shapes on white background, reds and yellows predominate.

At Any Place 4: From the Habanera of a Housewife by Yoneyama Mamako (1978) 16mm
Projected on a wall of the exhibition on single-channel video. Idemitsu continues her interest in shooting and re-elaborating on stage performances, here pantomime Yoneyama Mamako’s performance is overlayed with images of natural places she filmed. Visually and for its use of a wide range of music is a very fascinating work.

images are from the artist’s official homepage

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