April 1–30, 2026
e-flux Film is very pleased to present the April 2026 edition of the online series Staff Picks, organized in collaboration with Vtape and featuring three works by Kyoko Michishita: Cherry Blossoms (1975), Being Women in Japan Series: Liberation Within My Family (1974), and Video Portraits – Men: Shuntarō Tanikawa (1982).
“Everything I do is related,” Kyoko Michishita, Japanese feminist artist and translator, told curator Jesse Cumming in 2023. “I’m always in search of questions related to aesthetics, fairness, and democracy, whether I’m writing, filming, or videotaping. Fairness, democracy, peace, beauty, pleasure, sincerity, and honesty, they are all equally important to me.” Michishita was one of the first artists in Japan to adopt video technology. In the early 1970s, she joined the Video Hiroba collective that included Toshio Matsumoto and Hakudō Kobayashi, and pushed that group’s emphasis on video as a consciousness-raising tool to include feminist principles. Her moving-image work can be separated into major strands, though these commingle and inform one another: experimental works, sometimes shot on film, observing natural phenomena and everyday scenes in the northern region where she lived for much of her life, first-person documentaries about women’s issues in Japan, and interviews with prominent male figures in Japanese culture whom she believed proposed alternatives to its dominant patriarchal sentiments.
Since 2022, Vtape has been working to restore, digitize, translate, and subtitle Michishita’s work, making her films and videos available again for public presentation for the first time in decades. Since the project began, Kyoko Michishita’s work has been the subject of exhibitions and screenings internationally and of renewed scholarly interest. Vtape currently distributes ten titles, with more to come, and in collaboration with them this edition brings together three works by Michishita.
Films
Cherry Blossoms (1975, 16 minutes)
Shot on 16mm film, this experimental piece is inspired by a short story by Ango Sakaguchi about a doomed romance set against the backdrop of blooming cherry trees. Michishita dispenses with the lovers and retains only the cherry blossoms. Caught from every angle, they bloom and fall, communicating a sense of enrapturement with this local and eternal cycle. The music is by Toshi Ichiyanagi, a major figure in postwar Japanese music.
Being Women in Japan Series: Liberation Within My Family (1974, 30 minutes)
Following her sister’s second aneurysm, her brain surgery and long recovery prompt a questioning of a woman’s role in the Japanese family. This is Michishita’s first video work, belonging to a series of two works set in the Sapporo region where she grew up that question the role of patriarchy in structuring social relations.
Video Portraits – Men: Shuntarō Tanikawa (1982, 10 minutes)
Part of a series of “video portraits,” personal, one-on-one documentaries that Michishita made about various men in Japanese culture whom she considered positive counterpoints to the prevailing chauvinism of the time. Tanikawa, the acclaimed poet and translator, speaks to Michishita about Yoko Ono, true love, and the meaning of life.
Watch the films here.
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
Vtape is a vibrant distribution organization that represents an international collection of contemporary and historical video art, documentaries, and installations. They make their artists’ video collection accessible to curators and programmers, educators, scholars, and public audiences worldwide. In addition to providing a distribution framework for established and emerging artists, Vtape is committed to sharing video art preservation and exhibition standards, and strives to support hybrid practices in an increasingly complex technical milieu.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Kyoko Michishita is a Japanese artist, writer, and translator based in Tokyo. With her belief in pacifism, feminism, and art, she has been writing and translating books and articles for almost four decades. Born in Kholmsk, Sakhalin, in 1942, she and her family escaped to Hokkaido, Japan the year after the end of World War II. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1967. From 1970 through 1997, she served as the Arts Program Specialist of the Tokyo American Center, where she presented work by Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and many others. In the 1970s, Michishita was an early member of the collective Video Hiroba, and she began producing her own films and videos in 1974. Her video Being Women in Japan: Liberation Within My Family (1973–74) is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and her other films and videos have been screened at many festivals, galleries, and museums across Japan and internationally. She has published several Japanese translations of work by and about Gloria Steinem, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many others. Her own books include the essay collection Sensual Life (1980), the autobiographical nonfiction Farewell to Sakhalin (1995), and the novel The Blue Hour (2008). —Bio by Jesse Cumming
