Ko Nakajima: Video still from Mt. Fuji, 1985. Electronic Explorations BY BARBARA LONDON One might suppose that artist-made video support is still largely restricted to the tra­ would thrive in high-tech Japan, where con­ ditional art forms. And so far, the electron­ sumer electronics have become indispens­ ics industry has offered only modest and able parts of the social landscape. But this is occasional assistance in the form of donated not the case. Video limps along, subject to equipment, scholarships or festival sponsor­ logistical and conceptual impediments. ship. Exhibition opportunities are far more Although many Japanese artists have limited than in North America or Europe, been experimenting with video over the last where video has found a support network of two decades, they have been constrained by sorts. Compared with their Western peers, the expense of making art with electronic Japanese videomakers are on their own. materials and the difficulty of finding an They operate in a "twilight zone" between audience. In Japan, government cultural the fine arts and the commercial world, and 120 May 1992 .---- Masaki Fujihata: Video still from Maitreya, 1984. Photo Kira Perov. Though Japanese videomakers lack a support system and regular exhibition opportunities, they have produced video art in a surprising variety of styles ranging from the satiric to the lyric. Most notable are those hybrid works that fuse video installations with performance art. their works lack both the prestige of con­ developed as in the West. Still, video is impressive works. There are also several ventional art objects and the profit of enter­ shown in festivals, in artist-run centers provocative multimedium artists who make tainment products. such as Tokyo's Video Gallery Scan and use of video. This article will discuss, in A further obstacle to the development of Image Forum, and occasionally in art addition to art videos, the work of a per­ this art form is the prevailing conception of museums. The Hara Museum of Contempo­ formance group that uses video both as a set the nature of art in Japan. Long-established rary Art in Tokyo has included video work and as a narrative device, and the work of a conventions still hold sway, and many art­ by young artists in its prestigious Annuals filmmaker who exploits video for the sense ists, even those using contemporary me­ for the better part of a decade, and the of immediacy it brings to film. diums, produce anodyne works that soothe National Museum of Modern Art in Osaka rather than challenge the viewer and seem has been developing a video collection. or the most part, the modern arts of the vapid and cloyingly sweet to Western eyes. There are a handful of Japanese artists F West, including photography, came to In general, the video field is not as highly who work primarily in video and make Japan during the second half of the 19th Art in America 121 Video technology permeates Japanese life. It is slick product-launching presentations for used by hobbyists, by makers of video-commercial international trade shows, but they have supported very little else. Some of these billboards, and for visual Muzak in waiting rooms. highly successful electronics and camera Videotape is as common as wooden chopsticks. manufacturers, however, have been work­ ing with such prominent filmmakers as Peter Greenaway and Wim Wenders, hoping to develop new applications and to establish century, along with foreign concepts of a favorable image of being stylishly up­ science and industry. Photography was at to-date. So far such corporate interest has first subsidized by the wealthy, who sought yielded only minimal benefits to serious vid­ portraits of themselves or of courtesans, and eo artists. Canon recently launched its Art­ by foreign merchants who craved souvenir lab workshop to support new electronic art images of a novel culture. Symbolic of -and to encourage artists to use Canon Japan's swift adaptation of industrial and equipment. Although the company has not artistic practices from abroad, the early yet settled all questions of copyright and photographs combined a new Western tech­ marketability for workshop projects, Artlab nology, devoid of tradition, with the local is a start for corporate support of contempo­ esthetic conventions of printmaking, litera­ rary work, and if it is a success other corpo­ ture, journalism and advertising. Photo­ rations are likely to follow suit. graphic images were, on the one hand, connected to the old poetic vocabulary of hen the first portable video equip­ Katsuhiro Yamaguchi: Video still from ka-cho-ju-getsu (flowers, birds, wind and W ment appeared on the consumer mar­ Ooi and Environs, 1977. moon), which was suitable for pondering ket in Japan in the mid-1960s, a few artists Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. the beauties of nature and its cycles of life were immediately drawn to experiment and death. And they equally reflected the with it. Their formal approach was general­ traditions of the Japanese advertising ly influenced by the techniques of avant­ world, a boisterous realm of loud hucksters garde film and especially by the work of and of garish banners that were attached to Peter Kubelka and Michael Snow, who market stalls lining crowded temple paths. visited Japan during that time. But the his­ During the 20th century, the versatile tory of video in Japan really begins with a camera arts gradually came to seem indige­ 1968 event called "Say Something Now, I'm nous and indispensable in Japan. Video Looking for Something to Say," organized in technology, in particular, has penetrated Tokyo by the critic Yoshiaki Tono along daily life to an extent unheard of in the with Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, an artist still West. Not only are taxis, trains and doctors' working in video today. Yamaguchi had long waiting rooms equipped with TVs showing been interested in new media: in the early the news and visual Muzak, but billboard­ '50s he covered his paintings with lenses size video projections of soft drink and that turned them into refracted images that clothing commercials that seductively sell a shifted as the viewer moved. Beginning in "life-style" light up thoroughfares in major 1971 he applied this treatment to video mon­ Keigo Yamamoto: Video still f rom urban shopping and nightlife districts, such itors. A year or two before that, Taka Iimura Human Body Energy No. 3, 1984. as Tokyo's Shinjuku. Videotape has become began making video performances that ana­ Photo Kira Perov. as common and as disposable as wooden lyzed the relationships between subject and chopsticks. Video figures in both the enter­ viewer and between live and recorded tainment domain of popular television cul­ action. His works consisted of statements ture and the leisure world of hobbyists. and actions overlapping identical state­ Today's young artists, who have grown up in ments and actions on a prerecorded tape. a media world, may begin their careers by But video production was sparse until mimicking the styles of the electronic milieu 1972, when Canadian video artist Michael of video games, music video and animation, Goldberg, on a four-month stay in Japan, or, succumbing to the lure of fame and helped to organize an exhibition called "Vid­ fortune, they may work in the entertain­ eo Communication: Do-It-Yourself Kit." ment video field itself. Many of the Japanese artists involved in the While Sony and Japan Victor Corporation show joined together that same year to form have occasionally sponsored workshops, fes­ a group called Video Hiroba. These artists tivals or other video events, for the most came to video from painting, sculpture, part they and related corporations are inter­ experimental theater and cinema, as well as ested in the artistic applications of their from music, photography and graphics. hardware only if it will generate broader Many of the early experimenters were "dis­ Still f rom Fujiko Nakaya's black-and-white acceptance of their own technologies. They enfranchised" people-dissident art stu­ video Friends of Minamata Victims, 1972. have commissioned some of the more com­ dents, including many women. Courte.sy Museum of Modern Art. mercially inclined video artists to make The 13 members of Video Hiroba, among 122 May 1992 .-- them Yamaguchi and Tono, Mako ldemitsu, Fujiko Nakaya, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Haku­ do Kobayashi and Keigo Yamamoto, jointly purchased a black-and-white portable video camera. They began exploring the technical limits of the medium and assisted with each others' projects, which ranged from formal­ istic works to social-documentaries. An example of formalist video is the work of Keigo Yamamoto, who attempted to use the medium to express the Japanese concepts of ma (the interval or space between people and objects) and ki (the energy that ema­ nates from the spirit). He presented con­ trasts of real and depicted space and objects (in performance he placed his foot on top of a monitor showing the live image of his foot); he also created installations suggest­ ing, by means of feedback and visual inter­ ference, the electric "aura" of video equip­ ment. Around the same time Fujiko Nakaya's video Friends of Minamata Vic­ tims (1972), a record of a sit-in protesting a Japanese factory's negligent disposal of mercury and the ensuing poisoning of the residents of a town, became part of the protest it documente(l. In the mid-'70s, members of Video Hiroba engaged in important cross-cultural ex­ changes. In '73, Hiroba videos were shown at a conference in Vancouver, B.C., and they received encouragement as well from New York documentarians John Reilly and Rudi Stern, who lectured at the Tokyo American Center. In '74 the "Tokyo-New York Video Express" presented the work of 30 Ameri­ can artists along with that of 15 Hiroba members at a hall in Tokyo.