Ken Okiishi

Ken Okiishi’s films, media artworks and paintings incite poetic fissures and new possibilities in how we form ideas of ourselves and others: from a crumbling space of images of the self, languages and global-city-forms in feedback-loops of translation and migration in (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010); to the space of childhood in a "homeland" made perpetually "foreign" in A Model Childhood (2018); to a film, Vital Behaviors (2019), which finds an undoing of the suffocating space of social media in a miraculously sensitized re-performance; to a raw studio practice of painting, which first emerged publicly in the works from the series gesture/data (2013-), where painting, screens, and brain space collide in an entangled unraveling. Okiishi's work was recently exhibited in Painting Paintings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024-2025); The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020 at the MCA Chicago (2025); Digital Diaries at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf (2024-2025); and he has had solo presentations at museums and galleries globally, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum Ludwig, Cologne; University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa; MIT List Visual Arts Center; Take Ninagwawa, Tokyo; Fundació Gaspar, Barcelona; Pilar Corrias, London; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY and Los Angeles. His work was included in The Whitney Biennial 2014 and Manifesta 13 (Marseille). Okiishi’s writing has appeared in May, Bidoun, Triple Canopy, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, The Brooklyn Rail and a book on his work, The Very Quick of the Word, was published by Sternberg Press. He has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, Bard College and The Cooper Union.