He grew up in Cerritos and East Los Angeles; he is fourth-generation Japanese-American. He attended UC Irvine and received a BA in 1993 after which he attended UC San Diego where he completed an MFA in 1997. Trained as a sculptor, Kaino came of age in the late 1980s – early 1990s, at the height of the culture wars. Working closely with teachers and mentors who at the time were engaged in a critically important reevaluation about the role of identity and politics in contemporary art, Kaino emerged as a member of the first generation of artists of color in the US to begin to consider the ways through which contemporary art could be responsive to the conceptual turn while remaining faithful to the political project of artists and activists of prior decades.
Early career
Developing his practice at the height of the Internet boom, Kaino began to explore ideas of systems as a way to bring distinct wisdoms and knowledge forms into the language of contemporary art. Informed by the process of kit-bashing, akin to a model-maker's process of reassembling standard models and structures into new and innovative forms, Kaino began to approach his sculptural process as a form of conceptual kit-bashing—appropriating the languages, logics, production processes, and value systems of various fields of study to apply them to his artistic process as a way to consolidate improbable materials.
Artwork
Kaino's work ranges across a wide range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and performance. Kaino's most well-known works include Desktop Operations, a large-scale sand castle structure he debuted at the 2004 Whitney Biennial; In Revolution, a kinetic sculptural illusion encompassing a rapidly spinning Aeron chair that unveils the image of a chalice as it rotates inside its incubator; Untitled , a large-scale levitating hammer sculpture made from thousands of small Zapatista dolls made through a collaboration with Zapatista activists in Chiapas; The Burning Boards, a sculptural moment first shown at the Whitney Museum at Altria that encompasses a chess tournament played with burning candles; Safe, a sculpture made from amassed secrets that visualizes secrecy in material form; Arch, a large-scale sculpture commissioned by the City of Pittsburgh and the Heinz Endowment; and In Every Grain, a sculptural environment in which he used air and sand to construct an ephemeral and temporary city-like sculpture for the US Pavilion at the 13th International Cairo Biennale in 2013, where he represented the US. Kaino's work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; the Museum Folkwang Essen; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City.
Influences and collaborations
In addition to his studio practice, Kaino has collaborated with a wide range of organizations and companies on creative projects. An expansion of his ongoing interest in finding platforms in which art and creativity expand beyond the boundaries of the cultural institution, Kaino has worked with Universal Music Group on Farmclub.com and Napster 2.0. Kaino has also helped create various experimental venues to support the work of other artists. Working with collaborators Daniel Joseph Martinez, Rolo Castillo, and Tracey Shiffman, Kaino co-founded the seminal artist-run gallery Deep River in Los Angeles in 1997. Throughout its five years of existence, it was a beacon for artists and experimental practices in Los Angeles. Kaino was also a founding board member of LA>Derek DelGaudio.
