Makiko Harris

Makiko Harris (b. 1989, The Netherlands) is a Japanese and American multi-disciplinary visual artist, designer and musician. She lives and works between London and San Francisco. 

Informed by her cultural research, academic background in feminist philosophies, and personal experiences as a multiracial woman, her work imagines a future in which fetishized and marginalized bodies become empowered. Harris’ large-scale paintings, site-specific installations, metal sculptures and experimental sound works come together as immersive environments that challenge viewers to think critically about their own roles in power dynamics. Her work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including a 2023 screening of her short film, Circle Burn, at the Tate Modern’s Beyond Surface festival.

As a musician, Harris is a classically-trained violinist. She has been featured on NPR’s From the Top and won Festival Grand Champion with the Orchestra de Camera in the U.S. National Orchestra Festival. More recently, Harris has been experimenting with new genres. She released her debut album Rise in 2018 with San Francisco synth-pop project Great Highway, with whom she toured to Los Angeles and South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Harris is preparing to release her debut solo EP concurrently with RCA2023. The album features Filter House/Nu Disco-style production and incorporates improvisational violin and field recordings from her family home in Hokkaido, Japan.

Harris received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Studio Art at Tufts University in Boston, with eminent feminist scholar and department chair Nancy Bauer as her advisor. From 2012 to 2020 she continued her study of painting at the California College of Arts with abstract artist Patrick Dintino, and was selected as the featured artist for San Francisco Symphony’s 21-22 campaign. Passionate about community-building and representation within the arts, in 2021 Harris founded and co-chaired the inaugural Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee for arts nonprofit Root Division in San Francisco, CA. She previously worked in costume design on film sets (Law and Order SVU, Spiderman) and in fashion merchandising (Gap). Since 2015, concurrent to her art practice, Harris has been the founder and director of digital product design agency Silent Howl Studios. The agency specializes in empathic and insights-driven human-centered design, with clients including Uber, Sephora, Fenty Beauty by Rihanna and Marc Jacobs. 

Inspired by the power of creative practice in giving agency to the maker as well as sparking conversations amongst viewers that may lead to societal change, Harris’ multi-disciplinary visual art, design work, and music have been seen and heard around the globe.

Makiko Harris is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who explores themes of hybridity, gender, identity and power. Informed by feminist theory and her own experiences as a biracial woman, Harris uses painting, installation, sculpture and sound to create immersive environments that challenge viewers to think critically about their own roles in power dynamics.

Harris’ painting practice explores the body as a site of agency and resistance, offering a critical alternative to a world where women's bodies are often a site of particular scrutiny, objectification and fetishization. Her forthcoming Good Girl series, which will be presented in-person at RCA2023, explores lineage, inheritance and women’s roles in dominant family structures. Using high-res scans of kimonos worn by four generations of women in her family as the base, she reimagines these traditional patterns through abstraction. Her family crest, which was originally embroidered on the nape of the neck of the inherited kimonos and could be construed as a symbol of ownership of the wearer’s body, is enlarged and abstracted using a contemporary spray paint stenciling technique. In the Gem series, the same nine ‘gem’ shapes used throughout Harris’ practice are turned into custom-shaped paintings. While the shapes themselves signify a fragmentation or reconfiguration of identity, the use of color is informed by her research into the concept of the ‘monstrous-feminine’: vermillion red in Japan is the color of sacred temples and lipstick worn by geisha. In the west, the same color was originally created with toxic mercury.

In her sculpture and installation work, Harris further explores identity, inheritance and power dynamics. Her series of acrylic and chain tapestries examines the duality of identity as both protection and constriction. Transparent acrylic fragments create an atmosphere of freedom and restriction, delicacy and power. Shattered, they form a fragile, transparent armor. In her series of sculptures featuring marbled jesmonite hands and oversized metal needles, Harris probes the complex and often performative aspects of femininity. The work is both a critique of patriarchy and a provocation, imagining a world where traditionally feminine modes of expression, such as handicrafts, become not just powerful but capable of violence.

Sonically, Harris explores the idea of remixing identity. She combines classical violin and samples of field recordings from encounters of daily life with her family in Japan, including a visit to a geisha cafe and the chants of a monk in her family home during her grandfather’s memorial service. With these as a conceptual base, she mixes in contemporary synths to create a result that sounds less like an art-school experimental soundscape and more like a pop song, reimagining what the future may hold.