A5, 118 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2025

OBJECT / OBJECTION draws from the painting archive created by interdisciplinary visual artist Yuka Kobayashi between 2020 and 2024. The title itself embodies the dual nature of the project; as object implies material substance, while objection suggests resistance. Together, they frame the artist’s work as both an archive and an argument; exploring painting not just as a surface, but as a site of meaning, memory, and critique.

With a restrained, minimalist sensibility and a palette of “non-colors,” the artist reveals the architecture beneath each work. As she explains, “Removing the color information allows us to consider the anonymity and fascination of intention projected onto the canvas through a monochrome mask, and to re-evaluate the relationship between color and the intention behind it in the painting”. Without colors, the compositions are distilled into monochrome outlines and textures, like x-rays of the paintings’ very essence. Reduced to their barest forms and stripped to their “skeletons”, these works invite us to reconsider painting’s physical body, and to question how color shapes not only what we see, but what we feel and intend.

Despite the absence of colors, painting remains a deeply expressive medium — a dynamic archive of human presence, thoughts and movements, captured in each brushstroke. The physical act of painting records the human’s body and emotions in motion. The works are at once meditative and raw, minimal yet layered, revealing how the artist moves freely between inner experience and outer form. "Painting can be a recordable medium for transcription of body movement which traces how we exist on this world"

By digitally extending these textures beyond their original boundaries, the project transcends flat representation, inviting a three-dimensional perspective. No longer a static image, painting evolves as a living landscape of shapes, contrast, and transformation. Just as a figurative painting can evoke something familiar while remaining mysterious, abstract art unsettles our assumptions and invites us
to see differently. It encourages a shift in perspective, opening space for multiple meanings and unexpected interpretations. Yuka Kobayashi invites viewers to see painting not just as a picture, but as something alive that challenges how we usually understand it. Each painting contains hidden worlds, urging the viewer to look closer and deeper.

Published by