Circumference of the Sun

Solo exhibition Heritage Museum of Asian Art 

November 15, 2025 - January 15, 2026
 

Circumference of the Sun is a solo exhibition that considers the body through cultural, material, and temporal archives via photographic avenues and techniques. Mythological ancestry and technical etymology converge in this exhibition through visual, formal, temporal, and process-based series of works that propose the various configurations between the body, light, photography, and the sun. The sun is a central entity in Japanese culture and mythology. The origin story recounts the lineage of Japanese people to the Shinto goddess of the sun, Amaterasu. Photography means “drawing with light” and is now the word used to describe the general process of exposing light upon light-sensitive materials. Another word was once proposed to also describe this process: photogene, meaning “produced by light.” Light-produced and descending from light, like the people of Japan. 

Photography facilitated the collection of objects, likeness of people, and memories of places, creating a new system of visual information and archiving. Questions around methods of archival collections are addressed in the work A Japanese Girl, where notions of cultural biases are challenged through an eschewing of the frontal gaze in an artist-expanded archive. The activation of archives continues with 35mm slides coming from the Heritage Museum collection in conversation with Aoki’s own photographs. Ceramic chopstick rests inspired by softer forms of prehistoric sculptures propose sculptural imprints as an afterimage.

A lenseless process is used in photograms of the artist's signature bun, which mark the accumulation of the artist’s time in the darkroom. Sun-reliant cyanotypes present technical correlations between photography and the sun. 213 frames –the exact number of 16mm frames equal to the artist’s height– is arranged in a circle, transforming the artist's body into the circumference of the sun. The artist, a descendant of light (the sun), draws images of and with the body, through the photographic medium, as variations of light-images. 

Circumference of the Sun is one of three exhibitions by Japanese and Japanese American artists created in response to More Things Japanese. Curated by JI Yang.

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