Kenta Cobayashi 小林健太

“Tokyo Débris” WAITINGROOM (Tokyo, 2022)

This exhibition featured the «Tokyo Débris» series, inspired by Cobayashi's representative series «#smudge». Past works and new images were deconstructed and reconstructed into sculptural and video forms. The installation, covering the entire floor, created a dynamic interplay between physical objects, virtual imagery, and spatial elements.

Exhibited works: «Tokyo Débris» (Relief / NFT / Mural), «Broken Mirror» (Still / Sculpture), «#smudge»

Photography, Collage, Sculpture, CG, Video, Spatial Installation

The floor piece, «Tokyo Débris» (Mural), is a photographic collage composed of images captured from a high‑rise building in Shibuya. This mural reflects onto the sculptural work «Broken Mirror» (Sculpture), generating intricate reflections of light and color throughout the exhibition space. Additionally, the digitally rendered «Broken Mirror» (Still) employs HDRI lighting techniques to create a luminous virtual backdrop.

Mounted on the wall, «Tokyo Débris» (Relief) layers photographic images on fragmented acrylic pieces, each panel angled to emphasize the interplay between imagery and materiality. Complementing these works is the video installation «Tokyo Débris» (NFT), in which digital debris endlessly drifts through a virtual environment.

This exhibition embodies the complexity of visual imagery, exploring intersections of physical reality and virtual illusion, materiality and information, as well as memory and substance.

“#smudge” ANB Tokyo (Tokyo, 2021)

Focusing on the diversity of the «#smudge» series, this exhibition combined murals, sculptures, videos, lenticular prints, and lighting to create an integrated spatial composition. By employing fluid, vibrant color transitions, the installation blurred spatial boundaries, creating a ritualistic environment a former karaoke building.

Exhibited works: «#smudge» (Still / Mural / Video / Relief / Lenticular)

About the «#smudge» Series

Cobayashi employs Photoshop's smudge tool, stretching and blending photographic color data to dissolve the image's inherent meanings. Concurrently, he foregrounds the editing process itself—typically hidden behind conventional photographic practice—highlighting the physicality involved and framing it through a painterly approach.

All photographs used in this series were taken by Cobayashi himself, merging his bodily experience as a photographer with his practice as a painter. This intersection naturally arises from his long‑standing engagement with digital drawing practices, tracing back to his childhood experiences with digital media.

Another central piece of the exhibition is the sculpture «#smudge (Relief)». In this work, photographic color data is stretched linearly, printed onto metal sheets, and then physically manipulated by Cobayashi alongside metalworkers. The piece explicitly visualizes the sculptural traces of the editing process, emphasizing the intersection between visual imagery and physical materiality.

“Hello World—For the Post-Human Age” ART TOWER MITO (Mito, 2018)

In this exhibition exploring the role of art during a transformative era of the information society, Kenta Cobayashi participated as a representative artist of the digital‑native generation. He presented photographic works highlighting the discrepancies and resonances between technology and bodily sensation, visualizing the friction that arises between human perception and the digital environment.

Taking inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s theories, the exhibition investigated societal and psychological transformations in the post‑human age. Featuring eight internationally active artists, including Hito Steyerl, Cécile B. Evans, and exonemo, the exhibition presented multiple perspectives on both the hopeful possibilities and the precarious nature of technological innovation.

Exhibited works: «#smudge», «#video», «Sound & Vision», «Insectautomobilogy»

“Everything”

Centering around the representative series «#smudge», this exhibition combined various bodies of work, including «#video», which applied smudge effects to video footage of Shibuya; documentation of the hacked‑printer performance «Sound & Vision»; and the series «Insectautomobilogy».

Underlying these works is a nostalgic aesthetics of internet‑like eclecticism, resonant with Cobayashi's early practice shared through his blog “Everything” and the subsequent photobook series of the same title.

The word “Everything” originates from the famous question “What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?” featured in the science‑fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a beloved book from Cobayashi's high‑school days.

“Insectautomobilogy / What is an aesthetic?” G/P gallery (Tokyo, 2017)

This early solo exhibition foregrounds Cobayashi's social concerns, setting it apart from his later «#smudge» series. Central to the show is the series «Insectautomobilogy», in which automobile designs are reimagined as insects; by tracing their design lineage, Cobayashi evokes the emergence of technological swarm intelligence. Underpinning that swarm intelligence is an aesthetic principle he calls the “Universe of the Grid,” which forms the exhibition’s second critical axis.

Exhibited works: «Insectautomobilogy», «#smudge», unglazed tiles, untitled images inspired by the Vitruvian Man

The “Universe of the Grid” and «#smudge»

Cobayashi conceives Photoshop’s smallest unit—the pixel—as the “Universe of the Grid.” This grid embodies a computational logic of homogeneity and reproducibility, echoing the formal aesthetics of automobile design explored in «Insectautomobilogy».

Yet Cobayashi deliberately disrupts this structure with bodily interventions: visible brushstrokes in «#smudge», cracks in ceramic tiles, shafts of natural light infiltrating the gallery, and voice recordings from suspended iPhones—all appear as “non‑structural fluctuations” slipping into the regimented grid.

The exhibition thus stages a coexistence of order and deviation, structure and fluctuation, laying the groundwork for later series such as «#smudge» and «Tokyo Débris».

Summer Sonic 2022｜Entrance Gate (Chiba, 2022)

Participated in the exhibition “Music Loves Art” at Summer Sonic—one of Japan’s largest urban music festivals—by producing an entrance‑gate installation.

Developed from the «Tokyo Débris» series, which edits and reconstructs urban fragments, the piece symbolically staged a “remix of the city” through dynamic intersections of imagery and architectural elements.

Louis Vuitton Midosuji｜Show Window (Osaka, 2020)

Collaborated with Louis Vuitton under artistic director Virgil Abloh to create sculptural works for the opening of the Midosuji flagship in Osaka.

By expanding the brushstroke logic of «#smudge» into architectural space, the project laid the groundwork for the later «Relief» series and marked a direct insertion of bodily editing gestures into a luxury‑brand context.

Cobayashi also produced campaign imagery for Louis Vuitton collections in the same and preceding years.

Dunhill｜Spring/Summer 2020 (Paris, 2019)

Partnered with Dunhill, led by Mark Weston, to merge archival brand imagery with Cobayashi’s artworks. Unveiled during Paris Fashion Week, the collection featured coordinated sets, leather ponchos, and bags.

By embedding archival images within garments, the collection framed wearing itself as an act of re‑editing the imagery.

Prism Disruption (2025)

A video piece generated with Runway AI and morphing techniques, developed from the motif of «Broken Mirror». By tracing geometric transformations and spatial distortions, the work probes the “fluidity of images” as interpreted by AI, hovering between stillness and motion, creation and disruption.

Tokyo Débris (2022– )

Digital collages, videos, and sculptural works that reconstruct past images in a CG environment. Expanding the methods of «#smudge», the series explores urban memory, digital debris, and reflected illusion. Scattering and refracting light, the images unfold beyond the thresholds of physical matter and digital information.

Relief: Brushstrokes (2021– )

A sculptural series that transposes the brushstrokes of «#smudge» into physical form. Photographic prints on iron, aluminium, and other metals are bent and manipulated, permanently embossing the body’s editing actions. The series examines the junction of flatness and volume, vision and touch.

Broken Mirrors (2020– )

CG artworks inspired by fractured mirrors. Using HDRI lighting with spherical photography, landscapes and light are intricately reflected and refracted inside digital objects, revealing the hidden luminous data embedded in photographs. Physical mirror objects derived from the CG intersect virtual and real space, testing the boundary between information and materiality.

Performance: #VISUALINERTIA (2019– ) / Sound & Vision (2015– )

Experimental performances that translate Photoshop editing actions into sound («Sound & Vision») and synchronise iPhone motion with Photoshop mouse gestures («#VISUALINERTIA»). Developed with programmer Yuuki Takada, the works visualise the bodily gestures of photographic editing.
Performed internationally in Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, and Paris.
Programmer: Yuuki Takada.

REM (2015)

A slideshow that experiments with virtual photography by using a VR headset as a camera. The piece evokes immaterial drift and fragmented memory, challenging the perception of time inside and outside VR.

VR Space Design: God Scorpion
Music: Molphobia

#video (2015– )

Videos that document and re‑construct the editing process (mouse‑gesture paths) of «#smudge». Editing actions permeate the visual field, foregrounding the artist’s physical interaction with the medium and exploring photographic experimentation across time.

#smudge / #blur / #sharpen (2014– )

Series titled after Photoshop tools. By stretching photographic colour data, the works dissolve conventional meanings and foreground the act of editing itself, rendering digital traces as painterly strokes and binding photographic media to bodily mark‑making. 

Exhibited in shaped acrylics, reliefs, ZINEs, murals, and videos.

ZINEs / Books (2013– )

Kenta Cobayashi’s artistic career began amid the hum of copy machines and the scent of fresh ink.

Within the culture of ZINE‑making, he came to view photography not merely as image capture but as a broader cycle of editing, printing, binding, and exchanging physical objects. He printed pictures, folded and stapled pages, stacked them in carry‑cases, arranged them on tables, and handed them directly to people. This emphatically tactile practice laid the groundwork for his later expansions into installation, sculpture, video, and AI‑driven experiments. At the core of all these activities remains a tangible conviction: an edited photograph should arrive as a physical thing.

For Cobayashi, the ZINE became an experimental space for circulation and collaboration—his first self‑made ecosystem for living, breathing photography.