Translation: LOVE; U.B.W. Spotlight on Lady Aiko

   AIKO was born in Tokyo, Japan and  has lived and worked in New York City since the mid 90’s. She received a BFA at Tokyo Zokei University in the field of graphic design and filmmaking, before taking her MFA at The New School, NY graduating with honors in Media Studies. Her work in film has been highly influential on Urban Pop; she directed the seminal digital biography on Takashi Murakami, Super Flat [1998] and ran his studio in Brooklyn long before he was internationally known. In 2005 she collaborated with Banksy, posing as a Japanese tourist and taking the now famous pictures of him doing unauthorized installations at MoMA , Brooklyn Museum, Natural History Museum and The Met which catapulted that artist to fame and was later used in his Academy Award winning documentary “Exit Through The Giftshop”.
    After her apprenticeship and work at Murakami’s studio, AIKO teamed up with two young American artists known as FAILE, collectively creating work for the outdoors, galleries and print editions. After 5 years of collaborating in the US and international streets and museums, she departed the group to develop her individual artist career as AIKO. Her paintings utilize mixed media including spray paint, acrylics, latex enamels, oil bars, coffee stains, rhinestones, glitter and pigments. Her images often come from her daily documentation and photography, and she applies such techniques as collaging, stenciling, silk screening and hand painting to create a dense, layered image full of life and positive energy, as her name AIKO [Translation: LOVE] would suggest. After years of living in the US ,  AIKO has fluidly hybrid the essence of American contemporary art movements such as Abstractionism , POP Art , Graffiti and Street Art with the Japanese traditional aesthetic in which she was originally trained. Her paintings and murals tell a story, playfully portraying femininity, sexuality and the beauty of human life and her historical important is that she has the inside track to be the artist who unites Western and Eastern culture with her work.
    AIKO is recognized in the contemporary art world as among the most important artists to emerge in the new millennium. She is also well respected with the graffiti and street art scene. Her large scale works indoors and outdoors are installed in many cities, including the Wynwood Wall Project, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, in Miami, commissioned pieces for the Standard Hotel on both coasts and the 2012 commission to re-paint the historic ‘Keith Haring Wall’ on Bowery and Houston, the urban center  of downtown chic .  For the season of spring and summer in 2013,  Louis Vuitton released an AIKO silk scarf  as a collaborative accessory line of FOULARDS D’ARTISTES. The Japan Society majorly featured her work in a landmark exhibition in March 2013 “Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints”Her work has been exhibited at the MACRO Future Rome Italy, Shanghai MOCA China, Brooklyn Museum NY and PS1/MOMA as well as other major museums and galleries globally.

Text by Michael McKenzie, American Image Art
http://www.ladyaiko.com/introduction/

Street Art Vocabulary Throwdown

Dedicating a big portion of my life to graffiti and street art, I appreciate the fact that it has come to popularity enough that the Oxygen Channel chose to pitch it to mass audiences worldwide.  Unfortunately, tuning in to see the dilution of street art by corporations, to convert it for soccer mom entertainment is kind of a let-down. They really made very little attempt to stay true to the graffiti culture and that’s what brings us here today!

In a recent Street Art Throwdown episode titled “Going All-City”, the term “Bombing” was used by Bua and the definition: “Bombing: Painting over someone else’s piece with your own piece” flashed in the lower left corner. Maybe when Bua was working the streets that was a correct usage of the term, but today it has a much different definition. To do our part to help out the crew over at Oxygen, we will have a little vocabulary refresher.

To “bomb” means to hit up your piece all over an area. To keep things quick, a bomb is usually either a tag or a throw-up (or throwie). Picture the most prolific west coast (LA) writer: Chaka. California authorities accused Daniel Ramos of between ten and fifty thousand unique incidents of him tagging the word CHAKA. That’s BOMBING!

In the show, the term Bombing was introduced to during the challenge, to get the contestants to paint over each other’s work. For most of the artists this was considered “illegal” in the graffiti world or “the ultimate sign of disrespect”. There were a couple graffers who did take the bait and went up on top of their co-competitors artwork.

For the record: The correct terminology for this is “Going Over”. To go over a piece of graffiti simply means to paint on top of it. While most writers respect one another's artwork, to intentionally and disrespectfully paint on top of another's work is akin to a graffiti declaration of war. However (due partially to the limited amount of desirable wall-space) most graffiti writers maintain a hierarchy of sorts;

A tag can legitimately be covered by a throw-up, and a throw-up by a piece, and this is commonly done without incident. If a piece has previously been slashed (or "dissed"), it is also acceptable for another writer to go over it. To violate these guidelines, or to simply paint lower-quality graffiti on top of a higher-quality artist's work will quickly characterize a writer as an annoyance, or "toy."

Surprise! You cannot believe everything you hear on TV...

For more Street Art terms check out our Blog article titled: Street Art: From Tags to Riches