About
Kyoko Sato is a Japanese curator, art consultant, and editor based in New York City. As a producer for The Asahi Shimbun, she planned and materialized the exhibition “Ancient Egyptian Queens and Goddesses: Treasures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,” held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and Kobe City Museum, Japan. At present, Sato is also a US and Latin America consultant to tagboat.com, the largest online art gallery in Asia.
In 2023 she launched Japan Contemporaries a ground breaking publication dedicated to featuring the most dynamic artists from Japan. Kyoko believes that traditional art institutes, books, and media only scratch the surface of what truly makes Japanese art great and unique, often leaving out crucial insights into the ongoing artistic developments.
She founded and directed Asian Programming at WhiteBox, and she curated and organized various key Asian art projects such as a major historical exhibition, “EXODUS I, A Colossal World: Japanese Artists and New York 1950s- Present” (2018) included 55 artists ranging from Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, and Takashi Murakami to younger, emerging expats.
Many of her curatorial works have journalistic aims; among them are charity exhibitions “Ola Rondiak: Women’s History, a hundred years of Ukraine”(2022), “Fermented Souls”, celebrating the 50th anniversary of normalized ties between Japan and Korea (2015, Waterfall gallery, supported by the UN Foundation), and a photography exhibition “Lessons from Recovery: the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011” (2016, the Nippon Club NY, supported by Reconstruction Agency, the Permanent Mission of Japan to the US, Consulate General of Japan in New York and the Japan Foundation). She also curated performance and video art exhibitions including Luca Veggetti's “Fourth Characters” for Performa 19 at WhiteBox, 2019, 'Light Year 14: Japan Parade" (Leo Kuelbs Collection, DUMBO Improvement District, 2016), which gathered a record number of viewers.
While she was a part of NHK Enterprises, she served as the first producer to create the concept for the Omotesando Collections in 2001, a major fashion show in Tokyo continued today. She was serving as an Ambassador and Juror to the Ronin-Globus Artist-in-Residence program from 2017 to 2019. Previously she’s been a visiting critic to various educational and art programs including the MFA program at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), Residency Unlimited and the NARS Foundation. She pens papers and magazines in Japanese and English.