Half Waking

Tanya Leighton is pleased to present Half Waking, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Minami Kobayashi. Kobayashi's emotionally charged yet quietly rendered images sit somewhere between waking and dreaming. She draws on her childhood memories as well as her interest in religious iconography, Noh theatre, and landscape traditions while avoiding any fixed boundaries between these sources. Her works often depict transient moments where symbolic figures emerge from and recede into their surroundings: a masked celestial maiden at the edge of a clearing, a butterfly perched on a teenage girl's shoulder, or a ladybird hovering over a tarot reading. These scenes are not allegorical; rather, they are imbued with lived experience and emotional intuition, anchored in particular places and seasons yet open to imaginative reworking. The exhibition unfolds with the measured temporality of Noh theatre, where a single gesture can extend across minutes and symbolic resonance takes precedence over literal narrative. Kobayashi draws on this theatrical tradition not as subject matter but as compositional logic, creating paintings that operate through mood, attunement, and a nocturnal palette. The pine tree makes this theatrical framework explicit. It references the iconic stage setting of Noh theatre, where a stylised pine tree anchors the backdrop. The tree depicted in her painting is based on one from a park in Shizuoka, her hometown, where it is wrapped in yukizuri ropes to protect its limbs from heavy snowfall, a traditional practice maintained by local gardeners. Such gestures of care, rooted in specific horticultural traditions, function in the painting as quiet reminders of the interaction between natural cycles and human attention. An Oriental turtle dove rests in the branches, its presence marking the passage of a still morning. Minami Kobayashi (b. 1989, Nagoya, Japan) lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2015 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Incarnation’ at Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2025); ‘We Almost Forgot’ at Long Story Short, New York, and ‘The Song of Jujubes’ at Frestonian Gallery, London (both 2024); ‘I Spell a Word to Free You’ at Et al. Gallery, San Francisco (2023); and ‘Somewhere Not Here’ at Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum; Setouchi International Triennale 2019, Japan; Galerie Marguo, Paris; Frestonian Gallery, London; Et al. Gallery, San Francisco; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; and Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul, among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Ahmanson Gallery, Irvine, California; the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Los Angeles; the Boros Collection, Berlin; the Nixon Collection, United Kingdom; the Rubell Museum, Miami; and the X Museum, Beijing.

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Kurfürstenstr 156 & 24/25

Berlin, NY