Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician whose practice navigates propositions of spatial and visual acuity through research, material and process-based methodologies. Vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema operate as tangential frameworks of analogue image-making to negotiate visual and temporal relations within the mundane. A balance of revealing and withholding along axes of sight and relativity offers a nuanced attentiveness to our immediate surroundings. The body often serves as this inflection point oscillating between assertions of personal, communal, cultural narratives; while integrating material, geographic and spatial histories. Installations are arranged to emphasize and accentuate the relationship between the work, viewer and exhibition environment, extending the activation of two-dimensional images in a three-dimensional space. 

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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.

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 to push her practice beyond measures of cultural preservation. 
 

​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 the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Heritage Museum of Asian Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The International Museum of Surgical Science, 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’s work is held in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library and private collections and she leads Tsukasa Taiko, a program of Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW); and is also program curator at AIRMW.