Circumference of the Sun

November 15, 2025 - Jan 15, 2026

Circumference of the Sun is a solo exhibition by Kioto Aoki that considers the body through cultural, material, and temporal archives through 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, descending from light, like the people of Japan. 

An image of the sun as it is represented in the national flag is created from a circumference of 213 cinematic frames, the exact number of frames equal to the artist’s height. A running time of 8.875 seconds when projected as a moving image. Ceramic chopstick rests inspired by softer forms of prehistoric sculptures and pottery offer an image of the artists’s hand as sculptural imprints. Sun-reliant cyanotypes present technical correlations between photography and the sun. 

Photography facilitated the collection of objects, people, and places, creating a new system of visual information and archiving. Lensless processes continue to be used in photograms of the artists’s signature bun, which mark the accumulation of the artist’s time in the darkroom. 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 Heritage Museum collection in conversation with Aoki’s own photographs. The artist, a descendant of light (the sun), draws images of and with the body, through the photographic medium, variations of  light-images. 

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

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Kioto Aoki is a Japanese American artist, educator, and musician whose work spans photography, film, sound, and performance. Her practice is grounded in the material and conceptual exploration of visual and temporal perception, often shaped by her background in traditional Japanese aesthetics and music. Aoki’s projects have been exhibited and performed at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago Cultural Center, The Barbican Centre London, and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; among others. She is also a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and leads Tsukasa Taiko at Asian Improv aRts Midwest.

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