Kyoko Mitani was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan.

The first painting that moved her to tears was Peter Paul Rubens' “The Four Continents.”

The painting that inspired her to want to paint in oils was Claude Monet's “The Artist's House at Argenteuil” when she was 16 years old.

Since childhood — through mountain climbing and trips with her family — nature and scenery has always been a part of her. As a young girl, she spent her days playing with colors and creating —through origami, string games, sewing and knitting — while the calligraphy lessons she received from her mother later led her to painting with a brush. She also enjoyed expressing scenes from picture books, record jackets, posters and lyrics through drawings. 

After enrolling in the Space Planning Department at Musashino Art University, her interest in graphic design expanded into the field of design.  

In the late 1990s, during the bubble economy's final stages when urban-style design was dominant in Japan, she was drawn to designs that were primitive and rooted in tradition, contrasting with the prevailing trends. She expressed the inner aspects of human nature through writing, sketches, and photographs inspired by encounters with people during her mountain climbing and travel experiences.

After graduation, she worked on natural environment surveys and park and green space design projects, combining the design skills she learned in the Space Planning program with her interest in nature.

To study painting techniques, she participated in oil painting classes at Musashino Art Academy, receiving instruction based on theories related to artists such as Cézanne, Gorky and De Stael.

Through class assignments, she became acquainted with painters such as Baselitz, de Kooning, Karel Appel, Alechinsky, Jörn, Lindstrom, Constant, Dubuffet, Fautrier and Clement, as well as the CoBrA art movement, and developed an interest in painting that uses humans as motifs.

The CoBrA art movement resonated with her amid the stagnant atmosphere of contemporary Japanese society, overlapping with her interest in human emotions and inner psychology, and her influence from primitive art. It led her to consider whether she could connect her own artistic expression to the present day.

Her varied experiences — including design work for the construction industry — inform her art, as she incorporates the flow of history in Japan and the world, the interrelationship between people's souls influenced by society, and psychological aspects into her motifs. 　

She continues to create works expressing the fundamental power of humanity that explore the relationship between nature and humanity, the primal emotions of people, and the interplay of human souls.

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