Maiko Kikuchi received her BA in Theatre Arts and Fashion Design from Musashino Art University, Japan in 2008, and her MFA in Sculpture from the Pratt Institute in 2012. She is a multidisciplinary artist working in illustration, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, animation and puppetry/ performance.  She has also committed her artistic career to the music industry, creating music videos for a number of musicians and bands in Japan and the U.S.

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Making “Visible Daydream” is the coherent purpose for her creation. What, then, is her daydream? She defines it as her imaginary world that lurks in her ordinary life. The daydream consists of elements in her daily life, seeming familiar and unusual, distorted.



The first time she created her daydream was at her father’s old office when she was four years old. Her father is a psychoanalyst, and he had a big wooden box filled with sand and tons of miniature figures displayed on a shelf in his office room at that time. That was there for a type of children’s therapy called “Sandplay therapy” a method by which the doctor was able to analyse a child’s unconscious thoughts by the miniature world they created with the toys on the sand landscape inside of the box. Every time she went to his office, she was very attracted to the act of making her little world inside of the box. They are all the elements of this real world but depending on how you place them, the world becomes unusual, and it makes her imagine all the different stories behind them. When it was time to clean up, and she had to go home, the sand world felt like it had been a dream.