Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician whose studio practice navigates propositions of spatial and visual acuity to negotiate historical, material and cultural relations within the mundane. Through research, material and process-based methodologies, vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema operate as tangential frameworks of analogue image-making. 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. Installation works considers 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. 

She has performed and exhibited at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Mono no Aware, New York; the Chicago Cultural Center; The Lab, San Francisco; and the Barbican Centre, London; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago;  Heritage Museum of Asian Art, Chicago; 6018|North, Chicago; and Gallery Kobo Chika, Tokyo, Japan; among others. She was artist in resident at Light Work, International Museum of Surgical Science and HATCH Projects at Chicago Artists Coalition. 

Musical projects include solo and collaborative albums released by Asian Improv Records and FPE Records, most recently on an album with jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita; the Yoko Ono produced SKYLANDING album project; Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, Experimental Sound Studio’s Sonic Pavilion Festival, and the Soundtrack series at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. Aoki leads Tsukasa Taiko, a program of Asian Improv aRts Midwest (AIRMW); and is also program curator at AIRMW. ​