Profile of Katsuyo Aoki Official Website

Katsuyo Aoki is a Japanese artist born in Tokyo who creates sculptural work using ceramic materials. Since completing her graduate degree at Tama Art University, she has been showing her work worldwide.

From the start, Aoki ventured to pay attention to characteristics such as ornate, crafted, and narrative, that have been eliminated in the western art movement since modernism. She has repeatedly incorporated them into her artwork using ceramics, the historical material that has close connection to those characters for long. Having various decorative styles as her sources, Aoki elicits complex and intricate yet dissolving like expression from porcelain. Exaggerated external surface implies the inner essence of human beings. Her work questions the audience living today the present state of fundamental human nature, which is closely intertwined with one’s view on life and death. Her sometimes religious artworks, suggesting fantastic narratives, draw diverse imagery to the audience and allure them to an adventure of another spiritual dimension.

Aoki’s work has been actively showcased not only in Asia such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, but also in the U.S. at venues such as Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and in Switzerland and France and other museums around the world.

Her major series include “predictive Dream” with skull motif and more recent “Trolldom,” large painted ceramic slab using blue-and-white staining technique.