Kioto Aoki // 青木希音
Kioto Aoki is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician, whose studio practice navigates various mechanisms and propositions of spatial and visual acuity. Grounded in the analogue image and image-making process and through tangential vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema, she forms a rhetoric of nuanced quietude responding to and formed by observations and experiences of the everyday. Often in her work, the body activates, holds, and navigates the propositions of sight and relativity, through notions of structural tangibility and material or site-specificity.
Kioto descends from the Toyoakimoto performing arts family with roots dating back to the Edo period. Studying under her Tokyo-born father, she carries on a simultaneous musical artistic lineage in Chicago, playing taiko, shamisen and tsuzumi. Her musical practice maintains a balance of retaining the artistic and aesthetic integrity of traditional Japanese music with a musical flexibility that extends beyond the measures of cultural preservation. Her playing is informed by the Japanese aesthetics of ma while challenging the common misinterpretation and beliefs of percussion as rhythm, and uses often stoic gestures of sonic textures, abstracted soundscapes and embodied phrasing that incorporates choreography as part of melody.
Her work is held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago LIbrary and private collections. Musical projects include Yoko Ono’s SKYLANDING, Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, and Experimental Sound Studio’s Sonic Pavilion Festival. Kioto has performed and exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Chicago Cultural Center, 6018|North (Chicago), Gallery Kobo Chika (Tokyo, Japan), The Lab (San Francisco), and the Barbican Centre (London), among others. She received her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
kioto.aoki@gmail.com | @photoandkioto