Now that September has rolled in, we are now taking time to reflect on the amazing summer with the Community of Images project, complete with the documentations!

Julian Ross is co-curator of Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s. Lee Stabert chats with him from his home in Amsterdam about what drew these Japanese artists across the world to New York City, the contemporary issues reflected in the featured works, and the power of cross-cultural collaboration.

2023 was when I first met artist and urban planner Yukihisa Isobe. He welcomed me and my colleague Go Hirasawa to his home in Tokyo, with many materials laid out for us to view. Starting there, he led us through his work and connections to ethical ecology, archeological art installations, design & healing, socially-engaging practices.

Lee Stabert introduces Masanori Ōe, a key artist for our Community of Images exhibition and for counterculture filmmaking in both the US and Japan. A filmmaker, writer, and translator, he was a young man when he left Japan for New York City in the mid-1960s.

We are pleased to take the opportunity in the Community of Images exhibition to conduct research in Akiko Iimura’s legacy as writer, translator, and filmmaker. With help of Kentaro Taki of the Videoart Center Tokyo, and Yukishige Takesue, former colleague of Akiko’s at OCS, we dug into her films and news articles she had written. We located Akiko’s original films at the Iimura’s studio in Tokyo, and newly digitized in 2024. Takesue dug into the OCS archive and identified key articles in which she reported on the avant-garde arts scene in the 1980s and 1990s.

In March 2023, as part of the Community of Images exhibition project, we partnered with Videoart Center Tokyo to research materials at Takahiko Iimura’s studio in Tokyo. We were in search of materials related to Shelter 9999, a collaborative work between Takahiko Iimura and composer Alvin Lucier.