小林 喜一郎
Kiichiro Kobayashi

Kiichiro Kobayashi is a painter born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1995 and raised in Iwakura and Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture. He graduated in 2018 from the Department of Oil Painting, Faculty of Art and Design, Musashino Art University.

He has drawn and painted since childhood. In 2007, he participated in a workshop at the studio of Buddhist sculptor Myoukei Matsumoto, where he learned fundamental approaches to sculptural ornamentation. From high school onward, he became interested in how the appearance and value of the same thing can change depending on the viewpoint of the person perceiving it, and began making work around the multiple aspects contained within a single subject.

At university, he worked with performance and mixed media alongside painting. His 2018 graduation project, Real Clothes I–III, combined fabric dyed from pixel data extracted from photographs with images drawn from direct visual perception, exploring multiple aspects of a single subject as well as the relationships among memory, perception, material and process. Since then, he has continued to make paintings on dyed fabric as an ongoing part of his practice.

In 2020, The Rooster was selected as a finalist for the 22nd Graphic “1_WALL” competition. Taking differences between human and avian colour vision as a point of departure, the work addressed how different subjects can experience different worlds. Since 2021, he has presented his work in solo and curated exhibitions.

Through intense inner experiences since 2023, differences in how people understand the same events, and encounters with philosophy, his focus shifted from the multiple aspects of a single object toward the way different subjects give rise to different experienced worlds. Working with paintings on dyed fabric, drawing and digital media, he now begins with personal memories, dreams and inner experiences, using limited lines and colours, material choices and repetition to explore how meaning, judgement and a sense of reality are formed and rearranged.