KOBAYASHI Kohei

Born 1974 in Tokyo
Based in Saitama

Kobayashi initially produced video works that displaced viewers’ perceptions and awareness through reiterations of physical movements, disrupted movements, and impersonal actions, but eventually began playing the leading role in his videos, acting out combinations and permutations of objects and words. Thereafter he mounted dialogue/demonstrations in conjunction with others, and in recent years has presented sculptural installations that invite viewer participation. While Kobayashi has continued expanding his range of media, his work is consistently marked by a questioning of dichotomies such as human being vs. inanimate object, conscious mind vs. unconscious matter, and subject vs. object, and by exhaustive analyses and far-reaching manipulations thereof. At the same time, the force of the artist’s flood of images and ideas radically disrupts the precision of these operations. This is the core of both the inscrutability and the appeal of Kobayashi’s work.