video art – Asian Docs

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

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)

Part 2

“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

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?

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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.

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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.