ARTISTS
RYOKO AOKI
Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo
I'M IN THE DARK NOW.
3 min.
Geometric patterns multiply and transform on a page, revealing figures, plants, and fragments of the everyday in eerie tonal scales. This animation by Ryoko Aoki—an artist who has played a leading role in Kyoto’s experimental art scene since the late 1990s—combines drawing and video to investigate the liminal thresholds between nature and humanity, inside and outside, and the unconscious and reality. The titular phrase, “I’m in the dark now,” emerges every so often from the scrawlings before overlapping layers of colors and lines overtake the words to generate new forms and stories.
About the Artist
Ryoko Aoki was born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1973 and is based in Kyoto. She has held solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2005) and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (2002), and was featured in a two-person exhibition with her partner and collaborator Zon Ito at Watari-um, Tokyo, in 2020. Aoki has participated in exhibitions at institutions including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2021), the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2017), the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2008, 2014), and the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2008). Her work has also been shown in international art festivals such as the 15th Shanghai Biennale (2025), the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions (2024), and documenta 12 (2007).
