Whether under the guise of cybernetic art, Systems art, or new media such as video, it is evident that the “national and international network of contacts”Eve Kalyva, “Art and Violence in the Open Air: The Activities of CAYC,” Image and Text in Conceptual Art: Critical Operations in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 86. procured by CAYC under Glusberg was more than just a publicity campaign to extend its institutional identity beyond national borders—rather, it was CAYC’s raison d'être, a driving vision of art’s potential for utopian interconnectivity among global practitioners. 

In line with these transnational alliances, the influence of Japanese art and culture would gradually become palpable in Latin America throughout its modern history. Diplomatic relations between Japan and Latin America began with Peru as early as 1873, a link further consolidated by the not uncomplicated waves of Japanese migration to countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and Peru in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 12  From an aesthetic perspective, Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints were a source of inspiration for Latin American artists of the postwar period, including those associated with the Brazilian Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements of the 1950s and early 1960s, notably the influential Lygia Pape. 13  

The fascination of Latin American intellectual elites with Japanese artistic objects can be documented through their presence in the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires. One example is the 1954 exhibition Estampas japonesas (Japanese Prints), which featured ukiyo-e pieces from the Edo Period (1603–1868). During this time, Japanese artists rarely had the opportunity to engage directly with Latin American audiences or to critically shape the presentation of their own cultural production. Instead, their work from eras past was usually presented with some form of local mediation. One noteworthy exception was SAKAI Kazuya 14 ​ (酒井 一也) (fig. 1), an Argentine-born Japanese painter, radio broadcaster, and translator​ 15  with a complex diasporic identity 16  as both Japanese and Argentine who wrote the catalogue text for the 1954 exhibition at Galería Bonino. Sakai supported cultural exchange between Argentina and Japan, co-founding the Argentine Institute of Japanese Culture in 1956, also directing its cultural magazine BUNKA, which began circulation the following year. 17  His solo show at Galería Bonino in 1962 was pivotal for the international visibility of Japanese artists in the region, marking a shift from being seen solely as mediators of their historical heritage, to being recognized as active members of a multifaceted and evolving artistic community. The recent exhibition The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean 18  has sought to recontextualize the legacy of Sakai and his contemporaries as “perhaps the first generation of Asian diasporic artists in Latin America whose aesthetic projects cut through the lines of exclusion in the region’s art circuits, bringing East Asian cultural references to mainstream institutions in their own unique ways.” 19  By the late 1960s, the collaborative contact between Japanese artists and the emerging CAYC led these artists to exhibit and contextualize their works in new and more prominent ways—not only for their aesthetic material qualities but also as vital contributions to global artistic movements. Under Glusberg’s CAYC, artistic and critical contributions like Sakai’s, once the exception, would slowly become more prevalent. 

CAYC first established relations with the contemporary Japanese avant-garde through their first artistic project in 1969. Just one year after founding the Center, Glusberg would make contact with Japanese artists for the exhibition Arte y cibernética (Art and Cybernetics) (fig. 2). The original iteration of this influential exhibition did not take place at CAYC’s iconic venue but at Galería Bonino. 20  Later, in its 1970 iteration at the CAYC venue, the exhibition also included collaborations with institutions from London (Computer Arts Society) and San Francisco (The Graphic Gallery), as well as works by international artists, alongside local Argentine creatives and computer scientists. 21  The direction of Glusberg’s Arte y cibernética exhibition was in dialogue with that of the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968. 22  Reichardt also contributed a text for the catalogue of the Argentine exhibition. 23 

Both exhibitions featured artworks by the eight members of the pioneering Japanese digital art collective Computer Technique Group (CTG). 24  An unattributed text in the catalogue for the original iteration of Arte y cibernética—possibly written by Glusberg—titled “Why We Present This Exhibition of Japanese Prints” (fig. 3) describes the author’s meeting with CTG during a trip to Tokyo in February 1969. In this text, the author seems cognizant of the risk of orientalizing East Asian artists as merely technically advanced and expresses a desire to present them on equal footing with the Latin American contributors: 

These eight young men had undertaken … the fabulous task of integrating into contemporary art the scientific star of our time: the Computer. [They showed] great interest … in transmitting to the [world of] Latin American artists their new works, a synthesis of aesthetic sensitivity and scientific rigor.… Our idea was not only [to show] the creation of an advanced oriental group. Our own group, composed [of] scientists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, and critics, want[s] to decode and communicate this new link in full accordance with our time: art making science more sensitive and science enriching the artist’s talent and sensitivity with its advanced instruments.  25 

Although the text exhibits a certain bias toward a utopian techno-optimism, 26  the writer is mindful to present the CTG art collective and their role in the exhibition not merely as representatives of a technologically advanced yet exoticized culture but as participants in an “interplanetary” dialogue that reassesses science and artistic sensitivity through the use of digital technology. 

As the 1970s progressed, CAYC hosted a series of five more exhibitions featuring Japanese avant-garde artists. The final exhibition documented by the CAYC Files was the Japan Video Art Festival (hereafter referred to as the JVAF), which took place in April 1978 (fig. 4). While the representation of women artists was significantly lower than that of their male counterparts—only 15 percent, with five women out of thirty-three total artists 27 —the feminist poetics and politics expressed in their video works were of great aesthetic significance. Notably, KUBOTA Shigeko played a crucial role as a creative articulator of the Japanese experimental video scene, greatly influencing the global dissemination of Japanese video. I will now focus on the contributions of two of these Japanese women artists, IDEMITSU Mako and MICHISHITA Kyoko, examining both the shared conditions under which their video works emerged and their unique perspectives as auteurs. 28 

​​IDEMITSU Mako (出光 真子) is a trailblazing figure in Japanese feminist art and an early adopter of video as a medium for personal and political expression. Idemitsu was born in Tokyo in 1940 to a prominent businessman and art collector from whom she later became estranged.​ 29  From 1958 to 1962 she studied history at Waseda University in Tokyo, 30  where she participated in the demonstrations against the 1960s US-Japan Security Treaty known in Japanese as Anpo Jōyaku​ (安保条約), which aimed to extend the presence of US military bases carrying nuclear weapons in Japan. She then moved to New York in 1963 to study at Columbia University for a year. After a brief period in Europe, she relocated to California, where she lived from 1965 to 1973.​ 31  In 1966, Idemitsu married the painter Sam Francis. Their family life deeply influenced her artwork, which often explored the role of domestic labor in women’s lives. 32  During this time, she began finding her voice as an artist and as a feminist. She purchased an 8mm film camera, began taking filmmaking classes and creating experimental works, and participated in feminist consciousness-raising groups that encouraged her artistic production. 33  She also shot footage of the influential 1972 feminist interdisciplinary art project Womanhouse, created by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. 34  In 1973, Idemitsu returned to Tokyo with her family, bringing her experiences in experimental video and feminist politics with her. 

The catalogue for the JVAF lists Idemitsu’s video title as What Women Make, though the artist most commonly translates it as What a Woman Made (fig. 5). 35 ​ This video is considered a significant debut for the artist and was produced in Tokyo with support from the artist KAWANAKA Nobuhiro (かわなか のぶひろ)​. 36  Created in 1973, the video was first showcased at the Tokyo-New York Video Express screening, held at the Tenjō Sajiki theater in Shibuya from January 7 to 9, 1974. 37  Reflecting on the inspiration for the video, the artist said: “Something I had wanted to capture for a while was a tampon in the toilet that I had forgotten to flush, which looked like a strange creature.” 38  Idemitsu records a slightly out of focus close-up of one, or perhaps more, water-saturated tampons in the toilet bowl, presenting them in an abstract monochrome composition. This approach can be seen as a playful nod to contemporaneous minimalist art movements in Japan, such as Mono-ha. As the video gradually zooms out, the abstract shapes come into focus, revealing the used feminine hygiene product. As these image sequences develop and sharpen, we hear the voice of a male voice actor who takes on the persona of an older Japanese woman, parodying the antiquated belief that boys and girls should be raised differently—girls being disciplined to become future mothers, expected to bear the emotional weight of supporting their families. 39  The words spoken by this persona are not Idemitsu’s wild dystopian invention but are, in fact, inspired by passages from a contemporary bestseller 40  by a conservative educator and advisor to the Japanese royal family on the upbringing of young girls. Idemitsu queers these conservative perspectives by having a male actor embody the language and speech-patterns of an older woman. This sophisticated gender reversal creates a denaturalized experience for Japanese audiences, encouraging reflection on how much of these conservative beliefs—promoted by both men and women—ultimately serve to reinforce the homosocial order of patriarchy from the earliest stages of life. 

​​MICHISHITA Kyoko (道下 匡子) is a writer, public intellectual, peace activist, cultural promoter, and a trailblazing feminist filmmaker. Born in 1942 on the island of Sakhalin—a territory contested between Russia and Japan since the late nineteenth century, ultimately reclaimed by the Soviet Union after the Second World War​ 41 —Michishita narrowly escaped death before she and her family started a new life in Hokkaido in 1946. 42  From 1960 to 1961, she was an AFS high school exchange student in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. 43  She later earned a scholarship to study journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), where she graduated in 1967. 44 

During her time at UW and while working at the United Nations in New York from 1967 to 1969, Michishita was profoundly influenced by the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the emerging Women’s Movement, and Second Wave Feminism, particularly its consciousness-raising strategies. Upon returning to Tokyo in 1969, she developed a close and mutually influential friendship with NAKAYA Fujiko. 45  Inspired by her contact with Nakaya, who cofounded the newly formed Video Hiroba collective, Michishita also became a video artist and filmmaker.  

She debuted with her groundbreaking work Being Women in Japan: Liberation Within My Family (1973–74). In this video, she adopted an experimental documentary approach to explore the intimate story of her sister’s traumatic experiences following a subarachnoid hemorrhage and two brain surgeries. 46  While her sister was hospitalized, the rest of the family faced various challenges and inconveniences of everyday life. Through a series of interviews she conducted, Michishita aimed to capture both the transformation in her sister’s consciousness as she sought to reclaim her life, and her children’s awareness of “the important role—and the overtly discriminatory role” assigned to a mother in the household. 47  The video was first publicly screened at the pioneering 1974 Tokyo-New York Video Express event. 48 

The video piece that Michishita presented at the JVAF is titled Eating​, created during in June, 1975 (fig. 6). In this work, we follow the artist through a month’s worth of meals at her home. From the framing of the shots of the tableware, it appears that Michishita dined alone for some of these meals, while at other times, she shared food with company. However, all human figures are omitted by the camera’s focus, which centers solely on the food, plates, and cutlery. Some dishes served are quite simple, while others are more elaborate, often featuring a variety of items such as rice, miso soup, and crispy tempura-fried delicacies. The main motif of the video lies in the contrasting shots of the sometimes plain, sometimes elaborate plates served to the artists and her companions, juxtaposed with the resulting empty plates and empty glasses after consumption. There is a deliberate conceptualist nudge in the camera’s documentary examination of domestic abundance followed by austere absence: a phenomenon described by the VTape Archive as “statistical information on cooking and cleanup time.” Another deliberate vignette of the era is the presence of newspapers on the table during certain meals, as well as, most prominently, the music that plays in the background while each meal is consumed. This audio track showcases Michishita’s versatile taste in music at the time, ranging from the local popular music of KATO Tokiko [加藤 登紀] and the novelist and musician NOSAKA Akiyuki [野坂 昭如] to Canadian-American singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. The work presents a feminist subversion through a sardonic juxtaposition of scarcity and abundance, particularly in its artistic examination of domesticity and the drudgeries of unpaid domestic labor. However, the work also incorporates a gesture of sensuality and epicurean hedonism, which the artist has elsewhere described as “​sensual life.” 49  Through the artist’s autobiographical lens, we are introduced to an example of a female creative living a rich life surrounded by beautiful flowers and energized by healthy, delicious food in a room of her own, sharing camaraderie with her equals. 

When comparing the videos What a Woman Made and Eating, several formal and contextual similarities emerge. Both works are monochromatic and frame still-life compositions rather than human subjects, featuring everyday objects that relate in some way to the human body. Additionally, both make interesting use of soundtracks that initially seem to contrast with the immediacy of the captured images. Both artists are of Japanese origin, began producing video works around 1973 or 1974, and lived in the United States during the effervescently politicized late 1960s. While avoiding the art historical tropes of the diffusion 50  of the avant-garde from Euro-North American metropolitan centers to “peripheral” territories, it is important to consider the artists’ time spent in the United States coincided with Second Wave feminist movement, which revolutionized women’s personal lives as well as the themes and production of their video pieces. 

However, in her video, Idemitsu’s parody focuses on a single subject—the waterlogged tampon used by the artist herself—using blurry, sustained shots that linger on lethargic details such as the river-like blood flowing from the initially unrecognized object in the toilet bowl. Idemitsu subverts audience expectations as they begin to identify the bloodied tampon, creating abstract resonances with a voiceover describing how patriarchy shapes women’s education and development from an early age. In contrast, Michishita forgoes scripted narration altogether, turning the monthly menstrual cycle into a record of her lived experience told through the meals she consumed during that period. Regardless of how elaborate the meals are, the emptied plates suggest the nutrients have been consumed and will eventually be excreted. The presence of newspapers near the plates, along with the diegetic soundtrack from the artist’s home, situates the work in a specific time and place, reflecting the artist’s identity. In a cathartic final shot, a cake covered in candles—likely a birthday cake—symbolizes a subtle yet triumphant celebration of daily life, marking not just a month but a full year on this earth. 

Although Idemitsu and Michishita share similar backgrounds and emerged from a similar art scene, they incorporated their lived experiences in distinct, creative ways in their early video works—a tendency they continued to explore throughout their prolific careers in video and cinema. I would like to conclude by reflecting on the relative obscurity of pioneering feminist works by artists such as Michishita and Idemitsu within global art histories. Their works not only demonstrate a nuanced aesthetic and authorial vision but also hold the potential to illuminate shifting attitudes toward women, gender, labor, and technology in the 1970s and beyond. 

I am deeply grateful for the access that contemporary digital repositories provide for researching transnational artistic and social phenomena, and I remain in awe of the internationalist program CAYC was able to construct despite Argentina’s volatile political situation nearly half a century ago. Contact between regions—facilitating the recognition of shared experiences of geopolitical oppression and cultural and artistic reference points—gradually shifted from the efforts of extraordinary individuals with unique life experiences, such as SAKAI Kazuya, to being actively fostered through projects such as the International Open Encounters on Video and the Japan Video Art Festival. The experimental video practices displayed at these international events were not mere attempts to replicate international artistic trends from Euro-American metropolitan centers. Rather, they represented the potential of a curatorial vision that promoted cultural exchanges with an ethos of “interplanetary” openness. In these and other international events, CAYC served as both connector and instigator. And although these works might have circulated within their own circumspect artistic scenes, CAYC provided them with the opportunity to engage in dialogue with other global actors.