Kio Griffith is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, and arts writer working across themes of social issues, geopolitics and migrating cultures, through multimedia, craft and technology-based works including graphic design, 2D and 3D objects, time-based sound and video compositions, performance, computer programming, writings, installation, and publishing. He has exhibited internationally in the UK, Japan, Germany, Croatia, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Turkey, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and the U.S. Most notably are the 2016 Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan, the 2017 Emerging Curator at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and exhibiting artist at Tokyo Arts And Space, Open Site 2018. His current projects include co-founder at OOTE 41221 project space, co-founder of Transit Republic, an art and socio-anthropological publication, Genzou, an intercultural photographic journal, independent curator, and contributing editor for Fabrik, Artscape and Art Bridge Institute. Griffith’s work is in private and museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Growing up in a reactive industrialized postmodern Japan, thriving but also doubtful of the oncoming western influences of popular culture and in the meanderings and shifting—side to side between two cultures—I have learned to develop my numerical codes alluding to modernist mathematics. Building on conceptual socio-ethnological puzzles that translate into uncanny situations of nuances; mondegreens morphing in meaning and sound; literary tropes and poetics which transform in shape and colour while in transition. My work posits not merely reflections of this pan-nationality but also of pan-sensory experience. Fine-tuning of the listening/reading dialogue develops through exposures to auditory chaos of discordance, euphonies, and speech. My strategy is to reconstitute an ‘optiphonic’ paradigm that creates an immersive social, communal experience and to resuscitate what has disappeared in generational transference.
The current body of work is a process of shuffling information to find meaning. In a world of self-journalism in which documentation is a daily activity of sharing texts and images, the general idea of “reading” has changed. Reinvention and newly invented languages, truncated communication techniques, the relative associations, and the reading between the lines, faces, spaces, and the air surrounding us—we continue to interrogate.
The anomalies travel from wood to paper to the retina. The information is picked up in pieces and processed in the world of mind; the expectations of existing and being “real” and those “ideas” become synonymous with “differences.” In a previous sound installation, I have collected recordings of private readings that were introduced into a universe of voices, each formulating into a particular axiom relating or unrelating in the space. The newspaper series, which I began in 2016 during the sound installation, were exercises in finding the notations that constructed the text fields. These evolved into the notated collage work exploring the boundaries of fiction, theories, and news. Found books open to create a new flow in an attempt to resuscitate a new algorithm, in sculptural and animated forms. These works are a type of antithesis to contemplate—when the battery runs out of our handheld gadgets.
Self-taught or art school?
A combination of post-1980s California conceptual art school and several preconceived influences of Japanese graphic design 60s through the 90s, Mono-ha, Gutai, Butoh, and the visual-sound dialogue of free jazz, electronic, punk, protest folk, ambient, and experimental music.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
it would be a close tie between Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. or James Turrell’s Roden Crater
How would you describe your style?
Punk-Povera
Is narrative important within your work?
Yes, in varying degrees and portions which trigger the senses over knowledge. the narrative structure often shapes the time-image-sound compositional flow in tonalities and counterpoints.
Can you explain the concept behind your solo exhibition in California ‘no region would’?
“no region would” is a mondegreen. It’s a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.
The title may trigger a reference to a popular song or a novel depending on which side of the 20/21 century fence the mind is leaning on. Experiences could ripple into catharsis as woeful foundations pull out momentarily to expose possible engagements to feast on. The works were constructed by trusted coincidences; upon opening a car door, called by a lost connection, salvaging discarded work, random findings on a bookshelf, hesitant pause in a conversation, drive-by sightings, ear candy, accidental phone call, chance and an echo.
As the title suggests the capacity of an idea is being played out in free association, personal referential space, challenges of hierarchy, territory, and fidelity of sound.
The focal point of the binary installation is the single-channel video narrative, “proof of person (birth),” which highlights the struggle to establish a legal identity in Japan after my birth certificate was lost during demolition of the hospital where I was born. The lack of documentation constitutes real consequences, and also, quite possibly, personal repercussions. In a conversation with my mother who is heard but not seen, I proceed to replicate the document she made to substitute for my official birth record. In the creation of legitimacy for a status, questions are raised about gender and class, and about the causes and pitfalls of being undocumented.
“no region would” addresses cultural identity navigating through spatial-time zones, and is more an affirmation of identity itself through written and visual language.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
Duchamp, provocative strategist; Richard Long, nature poet sojourner; James Turrell, sculptor of incorporeal forms and spaces; Bas Jan Ader, searcher of vulnerabilities; Laurie Anderson, poly dimensional shaman; Peter Fischli and David Weiss, precarious kinetics; Carolee Schneemann, fearless, direct and sensual; Adrian Piper, observer and interrogator of ostracism, otherness and racial passing; Martin Kippenberger, accidental comic.
What or who inspires your art?
Primarily from sounds and light entering my body; music of every genre embodying improvisation; performance and happenings, the uncanny relationship between analogue-digital, virtual-in real life, cultures, languages, and space-time; 1960s surrealist literature, mystery novels, the game of chess, mathematics, comedy, the supernatural, spiritual, other-worldly and shamanism.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
I don’t have a go-to studio. I have always been nomadic and adapt to making work on site. An example of a favourite studio site is a long table set in a side yard amongst overgrown sunflowers.
Do you have any studio rituals?
Measuring space, addressing the numbers of the x,y,z-axis by mathematically playing out possible equations and contemplating the derivatives. christening the space by a reading ritual of selected poems. rearranging space, activating sound for evaluating balance in the space. communicating with space.
Can you tell us more about your series Versus, 2020?
This is a series I started a week into the global COVID-19 lockdown as the outer-world gradually segued into barricading from any unnecessary physical contact. Methods of communication have been filtered down to online devices and here I reside on my iPhone with an image editing app, conducting surgery and grafts on pairings of iconoclasts; rivals, mutual appreciation, buddies, or nemesis, all who had been influential and contributed to our current state of affairs, if not an emergency. “Versus,” is an image synthesis of comminglings of human discourse from historical citings. Either or both a muta- and metagenesis of dogmas, these mutated and loosely interlaced tableaux vivants, become embodiments of the next imperative mind channels for the future.
What are you working on currently?
I am working on an online curatorial project with two other curators for supercollider, an artist-run collective space in L.A., preparing for a PhD candidacy in research and curating, a time-space-language installation for an October show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, writing a short story based on the pandemic repellant creature ‘Amabie’, and writing a current art news article for Artscape in Tokyo.
Where can we buy your art?
Anyone can contact me by email for a variety of work including limited edition prints, objects, drawings, paintings, sound pieces, and commission work. kiogriffith@gmail.com
What are your ambitions?
This could be a long answer, but in short, I have invested interest in socially engaged projects, activist initiatives, community and cultural liaising, and searching for the unusual connections.
