Artist in Person Takahiko Iimura, Japan's most honored avant-garde media artist, began his career with On Eye Rape (1962), a commentary about the unerring assault on perception endured by the film viewer. Since that time, Iimura has created dozens of films, videotapes and installations that explore the illusionistic properties of cinema. Though Iimura's intent has been unwavering, his uncanny ability to push into new aesthetic areas has remained fresh and exciting. In overview, his work has been a grand pastiche of structuralism, eroticism, language systems, landscape portraiture, qualified by a concern for the audience. In videoworks such as Double Portrait (1973, revised 1987), Iimura repeats simple phrases-"I am Taka Iimura," "I am Akiko Iimura"-then negates them to call into question the phenomenology of the video image. In other videoworks, such as Moments at the Rock (1985), he constructs multi-faceted renderings of natural landscapes, asking the viewer to contemplate not the object, but the act of perceiving. And in yet other works, such as Ma: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan (1989), he uses the medium to visualize philosophical concepts-in this case, the space between-held aloft on exquisite imagery. But no matter what path Takahiko Iimura chooses, he always brings the viewer along. -Steve Seid