Lady Aiko

Lady Aiko (also AIKO, born Aiko Nakagawa in 1975) is a Japanese street artist.

Biography

Aiko Nakagawa was born in 1975 and raised in the central area of Tokyo.[1] She attended an all-girl high school.[2] While she was in college in Tokyo, she created a pirate television station that broadcast her own music videos and short films. The broadcast could be picked up within a three-kilometre radius and generated some local press coverage before the government sent her a letter ordering her to desist.[3] In the mid-1990s, she moved to New York City where she apprenticed in artist Takashi Murakami's Brooklyn studio.[4] She studied media studies at the New School University[1] and wheatpasted naked images of herself around the city.[3]

Towards the end of the 1990s Aiko collaborated with artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. The three formed the street art collective FAILE (then A-life) in 1998.[5] In 2005 she collaborated with fellow street artist Banksy for his film Exit Through the Gift Shop.[2] Lady Aiko left the collective in 2006.[5]

Aiko's work was included in the Museum of Sex's erotic street art exhibition in 2012. Later that year she created the mural Here's Fun for Everyone[6] on New York City's Bowery Wall. She was the first woman artist to be invited to paint the wall.[7]

In the contemporary art world AIKO [8] is among the most important artists from this millennium. Known for her ability to combine western art movements and eastern technical artistic skills. She is highly respected for her large scaled work that have been installed in many cities all over the world including Rome, Italy, Shanghai, China and Brooklyn, New York.[8]

Aiko's work is inspired by 18th-century Japanese woodblock printing and has been described as "joyfully, subversively feminine".[6] Her solo artwork on canvas uses a bricolage technique, incorporating spray paint, stencilling, brushwork, collage, and serigraphs.[1] She attended the international street art festival Nuart in 2013 in Stavanger, Norway. Working on two walls of a tunnel below the Tou Scene arts centre, she created a work with stencilled representations of silhouettes, women, angels, Mount Fuji, butterflies, flowers and a rabbit holding an aerosol paint can.[6]

Aiko is heavily inspired by her identity and experiences.[9] Another influence to her work is the process of making. For Aiko, it is the uncertainty and difficulties of large scale street art that make the work more interesting than art made in the studio.

Aiko is based in Brooklyn, New York.[6]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Daye, Kendrick (2011). "FAILE’s First Lady, Lady Aiko Paints The Blues". Art Nouveau Magazine.
  2. 1 2 Wyatt, Daisy (18 October 2013). "In search of a female Banksy: Aiko and Faith47 take on a male-dominated street art world". The Independent.
  3. 1 2 Jeffreys, Daniel (25 October 2009). "Lady Aiko". South China Morning Post.
  4. ↑ "About". Ladyaiko.com. Retrieved 12 November 2015.
  5. 1 2 Mann, Michael. "Get Acquainted with a Faile Guy". ION Magazine 6 (50): 22.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Vincent, Alice (11 September 2013). "Nuart and the women who are revolutionising graffiti". The Telegraph.
  7. ↑ Sutton, Benjamin (July 9, 2012). "Lady Aiko Becomes First Woman Artist to Grace New York’s Coveted Bowery Mural Wall". Blouin Artinfo.
  8. 1 2 widewalls. "Lady Aiko". WideWalls. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  9. ↑ "Female artists use the streets as their studio". From the Grapevine. Retrieved 2016-03-09.

External links

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