Through her installations, performances, and video works, Michiko Tsuda examines the nature and politics of representation in film and video. Exploring video as a selective medium, Tsuda's work destabilises the conventions of film to foreground the way in which filmic representation carefully frames, cuts, and edits images and moments in time.
Read MoreTsuda's installation You would come back there to see me again the following day. (2016) highlights the constructed nature of film by reconfiguring the relationship between screen and viewer. The work is comprised of 12 frames suspended from the ceiling and four video cameras, which project both real-time and previously recorded footage onto the rear of several frames. The remaining frames hold double-sided mirrors or are left empty. Navigating the installation, viewers are confronted with several types of 'screens', which variously reflect the image of the viewer back to them from different angles, or the images of other viewers. By confronting viewers with a dislocated feedback loop of their own and others' images, the installation disrupts the relationship between viewer and viewed, as well as the illusory linearity of video representation.
In addition to exploring the constructed nature of film and video, Tsuda also creates works using dance and performance. In 2016, the artist established the performance duo 'baby tooth' with dancer and choreographer Megumi Kamimura.
Some of Tsuda's performance works interrogate issues of gender representation. Following a six-month Asian Cultural Council residency in New York in 2019, she produced a performance work based on Yasujirō Ozu's film Tokyo Story (1953), influenced by the experience of watching a film about Tokyo in America. Collaborating with Kamimura, Tsuda presented a lecture-performance that highlighted the gender roles in Ozu's film by using the gestures of its female characters as choreography.
This work also provided the basis for the installation Tokyo Shigusa (2021), exhibited at the Tokyo International Cruise Terminal, which also focused on the gestures of women in Tokyo Story.
