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Shigeko Kubota

소호 소프/비 피해 SoHo SoAp/Rain Damage | 1985 | 8’4”
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Synopsis
SoHo SoAp/Rain Damage is a chapter in Kubota’s ongoing video journal that documents the aftermath of a flood that destroyed her and Nam June Paik’s SoHo loft studio, after a roofer left work unfinished during a rainstorm. Kubota narrates the incident—and the subsequent struggles with their co-op—as a subjective, tragicomic documentary. On-screen text collides with Paik’s often hard-to-follow running commentary, while images of the former editing studio are keyed into photographs of the damage, creating a layered record of loss. The emotional weight of ruined videotapes and equipment runs through the work, as does water’s recurring presence in Kubota’s practice—as both material force and expressive metaphor. Kubota frames the episode with a simple insistence that collapses nature and art into one feedback loop: “It rains in my heart… it rains on my video art… Art imitates nature, nature imitates art.”


About the artist
Shigeko Kubota brought a singular sensibility to her expansive practice spanning video sculpture, multimedia installation, and single-channel video. Over five decades, she forged a lyrical confluence of the personal and the technological, often combining vibrant electronic processing with images of nature, culture, art, and everyday life. A prominent Fluxus artist in the 1960s, Kubota also developed an idiosyncratic video diary practice that continued from the 1970s through the mid-2000s, using video as a form of intimate record, reflection, and temporal composition.