Artist ob Captures the Otherworldly in New York Perrotin Exhibition

Growing up, ob remembers feeling nature close by. In the sprawl of her hometown’s greenery, surrounded by animals, the 1992-born artist recalls sprinting through open spaces and picnicking beside mountains and rivers.

 

“Even in video games, I was interacting with nature,” she recalls. “Looking back, that feeling of moving naturally between nature and reality may still be connected to how I experience things today.”

Currently on view at Perrotin New York, her latest exhibition entitled Phantom Tales, depicts moments where reality brushes up against an ethereal realm. Thoughtful depictions of banal scenes—a girl slouching on a sofa while scrolling through her phone, a clique of friends sharing onigiri and Pikachu- and Kirby-shaped bread—somehow take on a hazy quality. Caught in a dreamlike pause, the quotidian is suspended in a soft blur.

It’s no surprise that influences from manga, anime, and video games figure prominently across ob’s works. The artist emerged from Japan’s booming social media scene in the late 2000s, when then-early platforms like mixi, Facebook, and Twitter were burgeoning phenomenons. In what she describes as “the cycle of ‘seeing/drawing/receiving responses,” ob recalls being drawn to the internet’s responsive, interactive nature, which first compelled her to share her early illustrations online. “Becoming absorbed in posting and sharing work online was my starting point,” she shares. 

Around 2008, her encounter with deconstructed, expressionist works online left a lingering impression. “I didn’t want images to remain only at the level of sensation or intuition, so I wanted to explore their technical and art-historical backgrounds as well,” she explains. “From my high school years, I viewed contemporary art in person and developed an admiration for the physical presence of painting—something distinct from images experienced online.”

Today, water, glass, and mirrors recur as key motifs in ob’s works. They saturate her world in icy blue tones while reflecting the large-eyed girls she often depicts. Across the first floor of the gallery, works such as “A Pool of Thoughts” and “Glass Shrine” feature lonely girls and pudgy stuffed dolls gazing outward, toward water or through a glass box, in quiet contemplation. Elsewhere, paintings like “Phantom Reflection” (the artist’s favorite) and “Emotional Time Lag” place mirrors and a lake of floating lily pads as the center. In another work, a girl wrapped in a white, flowing Japanese attire confronts the viewer directly, her gentle gaze set against a snowy background. 

In ob’s watery, translucent paintings, our own reflections also seem to shimmer across their eyes, aquatic surfaces, and mirrors. “I want to leave room for new narratives to be created on the viewer’s side,” ob tells TEETH. In the dreamy world she softly etches using colored pencils and oil pastels, the artist leaves space for viewers to invoke their own experiences. Characters and toys become vehicles for projection. “I treat characters and toys as symbols—phantoms—in which inner images are reflected, as manifestations of that psychological process,” she shares. 

In another life, ob imagines herself working as a psychologist in place of an artist. As counseling is shaped by building a shared space while maintaining distance, she observes a common thread between art and therapy. “I find in this state—being separate yet connected—a beauty that feels akin to that of an artwork,” she says. 

To some extent, feelings of loneliness and independence feed into the gentle world that ob creates. Girls and stuffed dolls appear both together and alone, but without mouths; their feelings are hard to grasp. “When I choose music to accompany my creative process, I find myself gravitating toward pieces that feel solitary,” she says. “I am drawn to books in which the structure of the narrative is supported by clearly defined roles, and I feel a similar sensibility toward the figures I depict in my own paintings.” 

Yet in this exhibition, ob ultimately returns to human connection. In works such as “Eat and Become One” and “Emotional Time Lag,” characters circle one another, sharing omelette rice, onigiri, and bread, creating moments of close intimacy. “Through the act of eating—of taking something into the body—I sought to portray images in which intimacy and a sense of unity emerge,” the artist says. 

Against the backdrop of an increasingly digitalized age, ob finds her answer in food. “There is a recurring pattern in which consuming food from another realm prevents one from returning to the original world, and I was influenced by this structure,” she adds. To eat is to become one: connection arises through sharing and boundaries get crossed. For ob, it perhaps all culminates in carving out this point of intersection, where dualities—solitude and connection, digital and reality, the raw self and its reflection—converge.

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From now until February 21, Phantom Tales is currently on view at Perrotin’s New York City gallery, located at 130 Orchard. Learn more details and plan your visit online.