Tomoko Mukaiyama is a Dutch-Japanese pianist, visual artist and director based in Amsterdam. She has been engaged by many prestigious orchestras and ensembles throughout the world, like the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, the London Sinfonietta and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, among many others.

Tomoko pushes on the boundaries of the classical music world. She has a fascination for offbeat contemporary art projects and plays with the conventions around her instrument, her profession and its performance. Tomoko uses her experience as a concert pianist to give a new dimension to the concert space. As a multi-modal artist she develops performing arts projects and art installations that combine music with modern dance, fashion and visual art. She has collaborated with film directors, designers, architects, dancers and photographers, such as Marina Abramovic, MERZBOW, Jiří Kylián and Michael Gordon.

Tomoko often uses autobiographical elements in her work, and by means of several media she converts and sublimates these autobiographical elements into universal themes, communicating with her audience on an intimate level. She moves between performing in more prestigious venues and creating musical experiences for the intimacy of just one visitor. In her work, Tomoko touches upon important socio-cultural phenomena which she encounters in her daily life. Her 2016 multidisciplinary performance La Mode centralizes the social aspect of fashion, where her 2018 dance performance GAKA tells the story of contemporary religious ritual. In her latest piece Pianist, Tomoko has consecutively performed 24 times for a 24-day period at Maison Hermès le Forum in Tokyo, where she concurrently held an exhibition made out of a forest of piano’s. Tomoko is currently collaborating with the Saitama Gold Theatre, The National Ballet of the Netherlands and composer Alexander Raskatov for new performances in the future. She is also working on her first film.

Tomoko has received the VSCD Dance prize in 2014, and the Japanese Dance Forum prize in 2017.

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Tomoko Mukaiyama Foundation

In 2007, Tomoko Mukaiyama Foundation was founded. The foundation aims to produce novel collaborations that are inspired by Mukaiyama’s artistic vision of intertwining different contemporary art and music forms. Thus, the foundation marries dance, photography, architecture, music, and more, towards the formulations of original aesthetic questions and conclusions. Hereby the organization also wishes to make its productions accessible to the wider public, both in the Netherlands and the international art scene. The Tomoko Mukaiyama Foundation operates as a producer of the projects of Tomoko Mukaiyama and has received multiple year grants of governmental support by the Dutch Performing Arts Fund.

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