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 six 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.
Aoki’s “Koons Ruins” series 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 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.
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 Koons’ most iconic pieces, isolates them on her estate and subjects them to destruction by chemical and mechanical means.
Aoki’s past “Koons Ruins” installations have taken on the form of artificial visitors’ centers with prints, oil paintings, sculpture, interactive learning panels, animation, a peephole diorama, and even a gift shop. Notes Aoki, “I often employ didactic wall labels, audio tour, and reverential vitrines to parody the institutional conventions. The unsuspecting viewer is taken on a wild ride of fictitious academic excellence while wondering, ‘Is this what we will value in 500 years?’”
In making the Salesforce Tower Top Animation–which is supported in partnership with Jim Campbell, Emma Strebel and BXP Boston Properties–Aoki says, ” I wanted to see my narrative take advantage of the physical tower. From giant chipmunks roosting on a buried ballon dog and tractors with ‘Koon’s Ruins’ logo, to the finale in which a compromised Koons balloon sculpture is tossed over a waterfall, rises, then sinks into bubbles.”
Honored to receive 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.
For information on “Koons Ruins” watch parties on May 17 and May 24, visit Kathy Aoki on Instagram.