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Lady Aiko

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Lady Aiko
Born
Aiko Nakagawa

1975
Tokyo
Alma materNew School University
Known forStreet art
Notable workExit Through the Gift Shop, Here's Fun for Everyone
WebsiteLadyaiko.com

Lady Aiko (also AIKO, born Aiko Nakagawa in 1975) is a Japanese street artist based in Brooklyn, New York.[1] In the contemporary art world AIKO [2] is among the most important female street 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.[2]

Aiko's work is inspired by 18th-century Japanese woodblock printing and has been described as "joyfully, subversively feminine."[1] Her solo artwork on canvas uses a bricolage technique, incorporating spray paint, stencilling, brushwork, collage, and serigraphs.[3] Aiko is heavily inspired by her identity and experiences as a Japanese woman.[4][5] Through her work she brigns visibiliy and recognition to women and girls as well as gender inequality in grafifti and street art.[5][6] 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.

Biography

Street art in spray paint by Aiko Nakagawa (AIKO)

Aiko Nakagawa was born in 1975 and raised in the central area of Tokyo.[3] She attended an all-girl high school.[7] 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.[8] In the mid-1990s, she moved to New York City where she apprenticed in artist Takashi Murakami's Brooklyn studio.[9] She studied media studies at the New School University[3] and wheatpasted naked images of herself around the city.[8]

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.[10] Together the artists created "large format, monochromatic, screenpritned female nudes," among other work.[11] They collective became very popular through this style which worked similarly across media from posters, to prints, to gallery works on canvas.[11] In 2006, Lady Aiko left the collective.[10]

In 2005 she collaborated with fellow street artist Banksy for his film Exit Through the Gift Shop.[7]

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[1] on New York City's Bowery Wall. She was the first woman artist to be invited to paint the wall.[12]/

In 2013, she attended the international street art festival Nuart in Stavanger, Norway, alongside fellow female graffiti artists Martha Cooper and Faith 47.[6] 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 to represent female energy.[1][6] The same year she designed a characteristic floral and feminine scarf for luxury brand Louis Vuitton alongisde other street artists Retna and Os Gemeos[13]

Street Art by Aiko Nakagawa (AIKO), characteristic of her erotic, feminine style

References

  1. ^ a b c d Vincent, Alice (11 September 2013). "Nuart and the women who are revolutionising graffiti". The Telegraph.
  2. ^ a b widewalls. "Lady Aiko". WideWalls. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  3. ^ a b c Daye, Kendrick (2011). "FAILE's First Lady, Lady Aiko Paints The Blues". Art Nouveau Magazine.
  4. ^ "Female artists use the streets as their studio". From the Grapevine. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  5. ^ a b Ross, Jeffrey Ian (2016-03-02). Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art. Routledge. ISBN 9781317645863.
  6. ^ a b c Vincent, Alice. "Nuart and the women who are revolutionising graffiti". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2017-04-03. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  7. ^ a b Wyatt, Daisy (18 October 2013). "In search of a female Banksy: Aiko and Faith47 take on a male-dominated street art world". The Independent.
  8. ^ a b Jeffreys, Daniel (25 October 2009). "Lady Aiko". South China Morning Post.
  9. ^ "About". Ladyaiko.com. Retrieved 12 November 2015.
  10. ^ a b Mann, Michael. "Get Acquainted with a Faile Guy". ION Magazine. 6 (50): 22.
  11. ^ a b Schacter, Rafael (2013-09-03). The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300199420.
  12. ^ Sutton, Benjamin (July 9, 2012). "Lady Aiko Becomes First Woman Artist to Grace New York's Coveted Bowery Mural Wall". Blouin Artinfo.
  13. ^ "Louis Vuitton Unveils Collaborations With Retna, Os Gemeos, and Aiko". Complex. Retrieved 2017-04-03.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lady_Aiko&oldid=773720055"