Throughout May, an animation projected onto San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower with images of chipmunks and goldfish the size of dump trucks careening across the building’s top floors can be seen from 20 miles away. Part of a series called “Koons Ruins,” it’s by Santa Clara conceptual artist Kathy Aoki.
The approximately five-minute animation, commissioned for the Salesforce Tower Top’s Midnight Artist Series, runs most days beginning at midnight, with early nights at 9 p.m. on May 17-18 and May 24.
“Koons Ruins” is supported by a 2025 Creative Capital Award, which offers unrestricted grants to artists creating innovative work. Aoki, one of 55 recipients this year, blends fact and fiction in satirical commentary that questions the durability and aesthetics of art, politics, gender and beauty.
A meticulous researcher with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Aoki, whose work is in permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University Art Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, uses printmaking, drawing, sculpture and animation in her pieces, which range from wall and learning panels to peephole dioramas, mockumentaries, interactive installations, performance art “expert” lectures and more. Monuments, or monumental presentations, such as the animation on the San Francisco skyscraper, often are components.
“Monument themes exaggerate the importance of things I don’t understand as important,” Aoki, a professor of studio art at Santa Clara University, says. “They’ve been in my work for a long time. In 2012, it was a single drawing of Koons’ ‘Balloon Dog’ in a state of degradation. Later, I created ‘Hello Kitty Monument’ a Mount Rushmore-like monument putting the Hello Kitty logo in photos, drawings, creating a simulated history museum and sculptures. In 2019, I was thinking about Confederate statues that are often considered canonical and are white male figures. ‘Disgraced Patriarchal Monuments’ asks what happens when art has fatigued the public eye?”
When the pandemic hit and civil rights protests swelled in 2020, Aoki turned her attention to degradation. Pieces in the “Koons Ruins” series revolve around fictional collector Dorothea James, who acquires American sculptor Jeff Koons’ most iconic pieces, isolates them on her estate and subjects them to destruction by chemical and mechanical means.
In making the work for the Salesforce building, Aoki says, “My digital drawing process wouldn’t show up well on the tower. I made the animation wanting it not to be abstract or merely visual loops of motion. I wanted to see my narrative take advantage of the physical tower. I use dark shadows as the dumping ground, and I wanted to see fish on the tower. At the end, a compromised Koons balloon sculpture is tossed over a waterfall, rises, then sinks into bubbles.”
An honored winner of a Creative Capital Award, Aoki says the grant allows her to delve into and make more robust parts of the Koons’ series, such as portrayals involving the Dorothea James character who must navigate the art world.
At the Miami art fair in 2023, Koons’ real-life “Balloon Dog (Blue),” valued at $42,000, fell and shattered after a collector accidentally bumped its pedestal. Aoki adds, “I had to be careful in the Koons series not to get sued; I thread the needle to not make it appear as if an actual Koons sculpture is being compromised.”
Aoki’s pseudo-educational presentations are 85 to 95 percent factual. With interwoven fictional commentary and astute comic sensibility, she questions how and why artwork should be preserved: “What is the responsibility of museums, collectors and others to take care of work? Should they be allowed to destroy a work the public has decided has outlived its usefulness? I take the extreme in language and humor to leverage ridiculous positions. People engage when their minds are tickled. They get a sense of awe and joy when they realize it’s a commentary.”
Although a reluctant performer, Aoki says her work “demanded I put on a wig and be an expert.” During Q&As with audiences, not knowing what to expect, she memorizes an encyclopedia’s worth of facts to control the narrative while speaking with spontaneity—a practice unlike putting a fixed work on a wall or pedestal.
Describing herself as “an angry feminist, but not one who’s so powerful you want to avoid the work,” Aoki offers dry humor as an entry point: “I lure them closer and by the time they realize it, they’re all in. Later, they can return to the thoughts.”
For information on “Koons Ruins” watch parties on May 17 and May 24, visit Kathy Aoki on Instagram.
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