Marina Watanabe "Playroom"

This November, kohtoh is pleased to present Playroom, a solo exhibition by Marina Watanabe. Having completed her graduate studies at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2025, Watanabe presents her first solo exhibition. Pigeons, foxtail grasses, pinecones, balloons. Drawing on things she finds in familiar places, photographs of these objects, and CG images she creates herself, Watanabe gathers and combines a variety of elements to depict unremarkable, unnamed landscapes. In her paintings, different times and spaces seem to overlap. Familiar things gradually drift away from the landscapes of reality, forming unexpected relationships and coming together to shape a world of their own. Watanabe says that, since childhood, she has enjoyed carefully painting what she sees just as it appears. For her, painting is not simply a matter of reproducing the things in front of her; it is also a way of gathering and reassembling the world she inhabits. Through her experience of making games, she has occupied two perspectives: that of creating a world and that of living within it. Sometimes, as she looks at grass growing by the roadside, she wonders about the perspective of whoever created this world. She is part of the world, yet can also take the position of one who makes it. Moving between these perspectives, she imagines that every existence is part of what makes the world what it is. Watanabe also describes herself as “an extremely ordinary person.” Perhaps, she suggests, you do not have to become someone special or do anything spectacular to appreciate a weed blooming in a corner by the roadside. Her attention to such modest things is present in her work, but it is also a way of affirming herself. Being exceptional or having a clear purpose is not the only reason for existing. Things that go unnoticed, and things that may be of no practical use, each exist in their own way and together form the world. In Playroom, Watanabe freely combines familiar objects, allowing different times and spaces to coexist within a single image. In doing so, familiar scenes emerge in subtly unfamiliar forms. Rather than converging on a single answer or message, this is a place where many things can exist as they are. By looking closely at the ordinary, we may also begin to see our own way of being a little differently. Watanabe’s paintings offer a small point of entry through which we can look afresh at the world we live in and quietly affirm our place within it.