After graduating from Tokyo' s Musashino Art University in 1990, Kitahara relocated to France, where she has studied at l'École des Beaux - Arts de Grenoble, l'Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris, and at l'École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. While she now spends most of her time working in Paris, invitations to residence programs and exhibitions have taken her and her work to places throughout France. This exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo, titled Ai Kitahara — How We Divide the World, is her first solo show in Japan.
Read MoreIn her work Kitahara explores the many and diverse "borders" we find around us. It is natural that such borders exist, for we create the fabric of our society by establishing them—consciously or unconsciously—in myriad forms, from the walls, doors and fences that delineate our homes and buildings, to the roads we build to cut through and link spaces, to the cartographic divisions we establish between provinces and nations, and even including non-physical borders like membership in groups, communities, religions, races, and species. "Borders," in short, are everywhere. Paradoxically, however, this very ubiquity often leaves us unconscious of their existence.
