Takahiko Iimura, born in Tokyo in 1937, graduated from Keio University, Tokyo, in 1959. In the 1960s Iimura began working in experimental film and, during the following decade, started making video art.

Shown as part of a six-monitor video installation at The Kitchen in New York, Performance: AIUEONN Six Features explores the incoherent relationship between the vowel sounds and characters of the Japanese alphabet and English. The artist grotesquely distorts the screen-image self-portrait, as he enunciates to camera the vowel sounds of English and Japanese. With this project

Iimura deconstructs our coherence as he shifts between the English Roman alphabet and Japanese characters, injects spoken Japanese and manipulates the computer images of his features. The images often take on geometrical shapes, others recall the classical images from Japanese woodcuts of a Samurai warrior grimace.¹

Endnote

1. Robert West, ‘Film Catalog: Online search’, The Film-Maker's Cooperative, http://www.film-makerscoop.com/catalog/i.html, viewed 24 April 2008.