Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician, whose studio practice navigates various mechanisms and propositions of spatial and visual acuity, responding to and formed by observations and experiences of the everyday. Primarily rooted in analogue image-making traditions of photography and cinema, Aoki integrates architectural, biographical and geographic histories that balance material and research-based approaches through nuances of material form, spatial play and exhibition strategies. The artist’s body and the human form often becomes an inflection point that oscillates between assertions of personal, communal or universal experience. The body activates, holds, and navigates propositions of sight and relativity as playful expressions of visual and formal imprints of presence.
Aoki is also the 5th generation of the Toyoakimoto house, an okiya (geisha house) performing arts family from Tokyo with roots dating back to the Edo period. Standing on the professional stage from the age of 7, and studying under father Tatsu Aoki (Toyoaki Sanjuro), she continues the family legacy as musician on taiko and tsuzumi; and under her stage name Toyoaki Chitose (豊秋千東勢) when on shamisen. Working within traditional and experimental contexts as a second generation Japanese American, Aoki sustains this musical lineage traversing geographical and cultural boundaries.
Aoki's playing is informed by the Japanese aesthetics of ma and emphasizes the melodic phrasing of space and choreography to reorient the notion of percussion as mere rhythm. Her stoic, durational explorations elicit soundscapes that project organic textures of live performance and sonic nuances of cyclical, droning sustain. Aoki balances the artistic and aesthetic integrity of traditional Japanese music with a contemporary sensibility, bringing taiko to contemporary artistic ecologies of music, sound and performance and extending her practice beyond measures of cultural preservation.
Aoki’s work is held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library and private collections. Musical projects include solo and collaborative albums released by Asian Improv Records and FPE Records, Yoko Ono’s SKYLANDING, Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, Experimental Sound Studio’s Sonic Pavilion Festival, and the Soundtrack series at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She 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. Aoki also leads Tsukasa Taiko, a program of Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW); and is program curator at AIRMW.