Kanna Aoki Suburbia Exhibition

Kanna Aoki was born in Tokyo in 1963 to her Japanese father and American mother. The family moved to Berkeley, California shortly thereafter, where she and her sisters were raised. After a childhood spent exploring drawing and photography, Kanna attended University of the Pacific, receiving her BA cum laude in both Fine Art and Mathematics in 1985. 

She and her husband, typeface designer Mark van Bronkhorst later moved to San Francisco where she worked full-time as a freelance commercial artist. After having her two sons, she devoted herself to fine art exclusively, and has been painting in oils since. 

Aoki’s work might be described as abstract realism. She illuminates the mundane with a quiet energy, a sense of tension and balance through the use of color, composition of shapes, and the physicality of paint. Her paintings may be less about the subjects themselves and more about the interplay of light, form and paint.