November Members’ Viewing: Kioto Aoki
From Kioto Aoki, 6018|Dance, 2022, 9 minutes, 16mm
This November, we present the fourth screening in our ongoing Community of Images series, exploring connections in experimental moving image between Japan and the US. As part of our Meander program and in partnership with Elizabeth Jesse, we are thrilled to introduce the work of Kioto Aoki, an active Chicago-based artist, educator, and musician.
Aoki’s work as a filmmaker is inextricably connected to the body including her own, frequently making appearances simultaneously behind and in front of the camera lens. The program includes 6018 |Dance (2022), filmed at 6018|North, a non-profit arts organization located in a classic Chicago mansion repurposed as an exhibition space, as well as Findings (2017), an earlier silent piece playing with shadow and light with dreamlike editing.
Strengthened by the influence of her family from childhood, especially her father (also a filmmaker and musician), Aoki’s practice has continued to be almost entirely based in black and white analogue modes. Seeking to capture the body as an all encompassing theme beyond the roles of viewer and subject, the physical human form is a site of exploration and experimentation. Experienced in performance spanning from dance to professional taiko, Aoki’s dedication to the body in movement is at once discernable as a core theme and ceaseless driving force in her work.
This multidisciplinary focus follows the figures in 6018 |Dance, backed by a thrumming soundscape of a single cello, in mirror call and response, playful catch and release, through the architectural space of a mansion turned experimental art space. This rhythmic back and forth between the figure behind the camera also features in Findings (2017), a short journey through light and shadow within a domestic space, calling upon the influences of such pioneers as Maya Deren and Yvonne Rainer while remaining entirely in Aoki’s characteristic hands.
Aoki continues to work as a filmmaker in her artistic practice, her archive spanning almost a decade and comprising more than 20 works. She has an upcoming group show at Kobo Chika Gallery in Tokyo featuring a film work and several planned film screenings in spring 2024.
This screening is part of our Meander program, which hosts explorations that fall outside of, in terms of timeframe, genre, or nationality, CCJ’s core framework of Japanese experimental moving image from the 1950s-1980s.
November Members’ Viewing
Kioto Aoki, 6018|Dance, 2022, 9 minutes, 16mm
Kioto Aoki, Findings, 2017, 3 minutes, 16mm
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the programs will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform.
This Members Viewing program is supported, in part, by a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation.
program
Kioto Aoki, 6018|Dance, 2022, 9 minutes, 16mm
The artist’s second film shot at 6018|North, a non-profit arts organization for experimental arts and culture in Chicago. Invited to activate the space by 6018|North’s artistic director, Tricia Van Eck, and supported in part by Asian Improv aRts Midwest, the work centers on dance, playing with the malleability of dance, movement, documentation, cinematography and choreography.
This work is the first in Aoki’s oeuvre to be edited [not in-camera] and include a soundtrack, utilizing three cameras to allow her to become “cameraperson, dancer, and mover.” The overlapping or blurring of the three roles, echoes conceptual films of the 1960s and 1970s made to film performativity, where “the photograph [or film] becomes a document of the ephemeral performances that are happening and becomes part of the archive.” The period of the 1970s also marks a convergence point between the New York and Tokyo factions of performance art, both cities that hold significant ties for Aoki. With similar motivations, this work allows for the audience to experience a translation of live performance in real time to film.
Kioto Aoki, Findings, 2017, 3 minutes, 16mm
A work shot at a family friend’s home, whose open floor plan inspired the vision of the uninterrupted cinematographic choreography. The camera follows Aoki’s movement through the home, where rooms flow into one another in smooth movement between spaces with windows full of light. Through the in-camera choreography and composition, we as the audience dip into the play of light and shadow in what could be a familiar domestic setting. Following her practice rooted in responding to the site or moment in order to highlight the importance of the body and using it to activate the space, the work creates a genre of dreamscape, accentuating moments in the original mundane space without artificial sets.
KIOTO AOKI
Kioto Aoki is an artist, educator, and musician based in Chicago. Aoki’s 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. The 5th generation of the Toyoakimoto house, an okiya (geisha house) family from Tokyo engaged in the arts dating back to the Edo period, Aoki’s music practice is based on her work as a taiko artist, also specializing in shamisen and tsuzumi. She will be participating in “Taiko Legacy 20” and “Reduction 9” at the Edlis Neeson Theatre at MCA Chicago, a vinyl remix edition of her recent solo album Paper, not Plastic to be released in January along with shooting her own music video for the album, and has an upcoming group show at Kobo Chika Gallery, Tokyo, and several planned film screenings in 2024.
Kioto’s 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, Experimental Sound Studio’s Sonic Pavilion Festival, and 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. She received her BFA & MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Elizabeth Jesse
Elizabeth Jesse is currently based in Tokyo, working as a curator and gallerist. They hold an MSc from the University of Edinburgh in History of Art, Theory and Display. They will curate an upcoming exhibition this winter at Kobo Chika Gallery.
community of images: Japanese moving image artists in the uS, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s will be an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
We have partnered with the University of the Arts, and will present this exhibition at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance in June - August 2024.
The project is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation.