b. 1937 d. 2015
Site Affiliation: Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation
The Japanese sculptor, Shigeko Kubota, born August 2, 1937, in Niigata, Japan, was part of the Tokyo avant-garde art scene when she learned about the eccentric Korean performance artist, Nam June Paik. The two artists became separately active in the same Tokyo art circles and both moved separately to New York in 1964, becoming a part of the community of Fluxus, a multidisciplinary group of artists engaged in performance art. From that point forward, they were together, encouraging each other’s artistic experiments in their Soho studio residence and became husband and wife in 1977.
In the early 1960s, Paik transitioned to video art becoming one of the very first practitioners of this new medium, inspiring Kubota to transition to video art in the early 1970s.
Kubota successfully bridged the moving image visual arts transition from film to video as the first curator for video art at Anthology Film Archives from 1974 to 1982, where she innovated and established the concept, “video sculpture” as a new form of the medium while also nurturing and presenting the work of new generations of video artists.
Primary Medium: Video and Performance Art
Primary Stylistic Term: Video Sculpture
Fun Fact: Nam June and Shigeko have been acknowledged as the “father” and “mother” of video art for their pioneering artistic, hands-on manipulation of broadcast television and the evolution of communication media as a means of personal expression.
Recommended Publications: Shigeko Kubota, “Women’s Video in the U.S. and Japan.” In Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, eds. The New Television: A Public/Private Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977), pp. 96-101; Fluxus Codex by Jon Hendricks; Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV (2023)