MAIKO ITO

I maintain my artistic practice while moving between Japan and Berkeley, and through periodic travel across cities in East Asia. Living as a queer person across multiple locations, I inhabit spaces that exist both inside and outside the social boundaries that shape everyday life. From these in-between positions, I observe how borders, systems, gender, and race—socially constructed lines—quietly yet powerfully determine the conditions under which people are able to live.

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These experiences are not mine alone. Many individuals navigate forms of marginality that remain difficult to perceive and are often overlooked within dominant social structures. While the ways we live should ideally be shaped by personal choice, such freedom is unevenly distributed. Those who cannot easily choose where or how they belong are nonetheless integral to the fabric of our society.

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My practice begins from these situated experiences and seeks to give form to the quiet presences of lives that are not readily visible. Working through processes of layering, transfer, and erasure—often combining acrylic painting with cyanotype on materials such as Tyvek—I explore how images accumulate, fade, and re-emerge, much like memory itself. Through movement across borders, I gather fragmented perspectives and inscribe them into social and spatial landscapes.

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By foregrounding these subtle yet persistent presences, my work traces lives lived along boundaries—geographical, social, and perceptual. I hope that encountering my work invites viewers to reflect on their own positions and ways of seeing, and to reconsider the invisible lines that shape the world around them.