Mako Idemitsu
| Mako Idemitsu | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1940 Tokyo, Japan |
| Occupation | Visual Image Creator |
| Years active | 1974 – present |
| Website | Official site |
Mako Idemitsu (出光 真子 Idemitsu Mako?, born 1940, Tokyo, Japan) is an experimental video art and film artist.
Mako Idemitsu was born in Ohta-ku, Japan and is the daughter of Japanese businessman and art collector Sazō Idemitsu, founder of Idemitsu Kosan. Through her father's collecting Mako was introduced to Sam Francis and later moved into his California home in the early 1960s before becoming his fourth wife in 1966. Mako was subsequently disinherited and disowned by her father. Idemitsu has two sons from her marriage with Francis, Osamu and Shingo. It was as a young mother that she became a film and later video artist.
She was to find that even among the hippies and the liberated counterculture of the 1960s in California, she was to experience male chauvinism, different in nature from that of her homeland, but chauvinism nonetheless. It was whilst searching for a role outside that of wife and mother, which she had fallen into, that she by impulse bought a Super 8 film camera and began her career as a film artist.
Mako Idemitsu returned to Japan with Francis and her sons in 1973, originally planning to stay in Japan for a year. In 1974 when Francis returned to the United States, Mako Idemitsu chose to remain in Japan and the couple would later divorce, with Francis marrying for a fifth time in 1985.
On the subject of her father, Mako Idemitsu said that he had a Confucian attitude towards women, and embraced a patriarchal view of the role of men and women that led to the belittling of his wife and daughters. She also said that he acted to deny them their individuality and independence.
In the early 1970s, Mako Idemitsu was one of the pioneers of video art. The technical limitations of the equipment at the time had an influence on the direction of her work. Idemitsu first started to work in the United States initially with 8 mm film and then moving onto 16 mm film. She became interested in capturing the mood, quality and interplay of light and shadow. When she switched to working with video, the inability of the video cameras of the time to capture the quality of light, led to the increasing use of narrative in her work. On her return to Japan the cumbersomeness of the equipment and an inability to easily film outdoors led to her use of indoor one camera setups.
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