NEW JAPANESE PAINTING
(*1994, Sapporo, lives and works in Sapporo, Japan) is fascinated by the emotional impact of visual signs as well as by premonitions and moods that we suddenly encounter in everyday life and that cannot be grasped in words alone. And yet since then the artist has been using drawings, paintings and installations to try to capture what cannot actually be captured. During an artist residency in Portland, USA in 2018, Kobayashi developed keen interest in graffiti, the meaning of which for her was hidden due to a lack of language skills. What remains, she wondered, when signs are stripped of their meaning? Can signs still convey something when they originate by chance? An artistic experiment that deals with these central questions of her work is her graphical documentation of noises or conversations on the street. What arises are characters similar to letters, which, however, cannot be read in a conventional manner. The artist's hand functions more like the needle of a seismograph, which registers when mood changes occur.