Working between Los Angeles and Japan, Kio Griffith composes with the ways the world voices itself: speech and song, type and dialect, silence and mishearing, transmitted signals, and the murmurings of animals, insects, and plants. Through sound, installation, moving image, performance, and publication, he traces how language, listening, memory, and place are made, carried, and transformed.
Griffith grew up on the Shonan coast of Kanagawa and across the Kanto region, and has lived and worked in Los Angeles for more than three decades. He works with readily accessible materials, including vinyl records, printed matter, clocks, photographs, and salvaged electronics, which he transforms through erasure, reassembly, repetition, and translation.
In revolutions per minute, Griffith reworks 45 rpm singles by sanding their grooves while leaving the residue on the record. When played, the needle partly retrieves the underlying song and continually redistributes the debris, so that no rotation produces the same sound twice. By replacing the records’ original titles with political manifestos and corporate slogans, the work brings the brief force of a hit song into contact with the incomplete, recurring promises of revolution.
In Coral Sea, Griffith brings together family histories across the Pacific through lithographic blueprints, photographs, hand built objects, woodblock prints, and a fictional postage stamp. Recombining elements from American and Japanese naval technologies into impossible hybrid forms, the work considers how conflict, migration, inheritance, and identity remain entangled across generations.
For white house, Griffith traveled across Japan and recorded conversations with regional dialect speakers, craft practitioners, poets, musicians, and people in Indigenous communities in Hokkaido and Okinawa. Beginning with a question about color and personal association, these exchanges moved from unfamiliarity toward intimacy, producing texts, memories, and lived experience that he recomposed across 48 speakers embedded in a felt surface graded from black to white. The installation makes listening spatial and relational: each voice, played at low volume, asks for close attention while remaining part of a larger, shifting field of sound and light.
His current projects include the Gotōchi Song Archive, a bilingual initiative tracing Japan’s regional songs and the places they promise, and Made in Occupied Japan, a project centered on performers of mixed heritage in Japanese popular music of the 1960s and 1970s. Both explore how recorded song carries histories of place and identity.
Griffith’s work has been presented throughout North America, Europe, and Asia and is held in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was profiled in Bijutsu Techō in 2026, received the Kate Johnson Digital Arts Fellowship from the City of Santa Monica, and was selected as an Emerging Curator at LACE. He is also a curator, writer, translator, and graphic designer, and teaches at Tama Art University. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a BFA from Otis/Parsons School of Design.
Selected Exhibitions & Performances
2025 · Angel City Jazz Festival, REDCAT, Los Angeles
Coordinates. Live audio reactive projection created for Daniel Rosenboom’s composition. Visual system conceived and produced by Griffith.
2023 · Romantic Route 3 Arts Festival, Miaoli, Taiwan
Oillusion. Video and sound installation in a former oil refinery built during Japanese colonial rule. Two adjacent rooms stage the two sides of a vinyl record, joined by a generative map of an archaic and futuristic oil field drawn from the site’s production history and portraits of oil magnates.
2023 · Liquidity, Zuiunan, Kyoto
The Third Rail. Installation in the tea room of a Kyoto machiya. Group exhibition curated by Takayuki Yamada, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
2019 · Alfa Romeo Tango Gallery, Battleship USS Iowa Museum, San Pedro, Los Angeles
Coral Sea: The Unsung Battle of the South Pacific. Solo exhibition aboard the USS Iowa, curated by Ben Jackel.
2018 · TOKAS OPEN SITE, Tokyo Arts and Space, Tokyo
Photopia/Scotopia. Socially engaged photography installation built from family photographs contributed by Tokyo residents, setting private histories against a city landscape reshaped by redevelopment. Presented as Genzo, a collaborative project.
2018 · Sankeien Garden, Yokohama
Kagerou to Nigemizu. Live visual performance in a sixteenth century temple building relocated from Kyoto. A laboratory of liquids and test tubes was filmed through an endoscope and projected live, in collaboration with percussionist Marcos Fernandes and dancer Nanako Ueda.
2016 · Aichi Triennale
white house. Multichannel sound installation. A susurration of voices from across Japan rises through a felt field graded from black to white.
Contact
For exhibitions, performances, commissions, and CV requests:
kiogriffith@gmail.com
ロサンゼルスと日本を拠点に活動するキオ・グリフィス（Kio Griffith）は、耳に残る音や言葉を手がかりに制作している。語り声や歌声、聞き慣れない方言、活字のかすれ、聞き違い、言葉にならない気配。電波のざわめき、虫の音、葉のそよぎ。そうした音や言葉をたどりながら、サウンド、インスタレーション、映像、パフォーマンス、出版を通して、言語、記憶、場所の関わりを探っている。
神奈川県の湘南海岸と関東各地で育ち、30年以上にわたりロサンゼルスを拠点に活動している。レコード、印刷物、時計、写真、廃品となった電子機器など、身近な素材を用い、消去、再構成、反復、翻訳を通して、日常にあるものを別のかたちへと変えていく。
《revolutions per minute》では、45回転のシングル盤の溝を削り、削りかすを盤面に残したまま再生する。針は元の曲の断片を拾いながら削りかすを動かし続けるため、同じ音が二度鳴ることはない。曲名は政治的なマニフェストや企業のスローガンに置き換えられ、ヒット曲がもつ束の間の熱量と、繰り返し掲げられてきた「革命」の未完の約束が重なり合う。
《Coral Sea》では、太平洋をまたぐ家族の歴史を、リトグラフの設計図、写真、手製のオブジェ、木版画、架空の切手によって結び合わせる。アメリカと日本の海軍技術を組み合わせた、作動しえない架空の混成体を通して、紛争、移住、継承、アイデンティティが世代を超えて絡み合う姿を描き出す。
《white house》では、日本各地で方言を話す人々、職人、詩人、音楽家、北海道や沖縄の先住民族コミュニティの人々との対話を録音した。色と、そこから呼び起こされる個人的な記憶をめぐる問いから始まった対話は、しだいに親密な語らいへと変わっていった。そこで生まれた言葉や記憶を、黒から白へと移り変わるフェルトの表面に埋め込まれた48台のスピーカーから再生する。小さな音量で流れる一つひとつの声に耳を寄せると、周囲の声との重なりや距離が変わり、空間の聞こえ方も変わっていく。
作品は北米、ヨーロッパ、アジアで発表され、ロサンゼルス・カウンティ美術館を含むコレクションに収蔵されている。主な展覧会に「あいちトリエンナーレ2016」、「TOKAS OPEN SITE」（トーキョーアーツアンドスペース、2018）、「Liquidity」（瑞雲庵、京都、2023）、「浪漫台三線芸術季」（台湾、2023）、個展《Coral Sea: The Unsung Battle of the South Pacific》（戦艦アイオワ博物館、ロサンゼルス、2019）など。
2026年に『美術手帖』で紹介された。サンタモニカ市のケイト・ジョンソン・デジタルアーツ・フェローシップ受賞、LACE（Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions）のエマージング・キュレーター選出などの経歴をもつ。キュレーター、文筆家、翻訳家、グラフィックデザイナーとしても活動し、多摩美術大学で教鞭を執る。カリフォルニア大学サンタバーバラ校でMFA、オーティス／パーソンズ・スクール・オブ・デザインでBFAを取得。
お問い合わせ
お問い合わせは、こちらまでお願いいたします。
kiogriffith@gmail.com