Watanabe is an artist who employs a variety of expressive techniques, including photography, painting, sculpture, and even performance, to pose questions about our perspectives on the world. His works explore how we visually organize and infer things by combining and fragmentarily arranging various elements such as reflections, transparencies, phenomena of light and shadow, and traces of paint. The theme of his work is the ‘segmentation of seeing,’ demonstrating that the ‘segmentation’ of the world is inherently subjective, fragmented, and dependent on time. However, these fragments expand, forming new connections. Watanabe’ s work explores new possibilities in visual perception and recognition, providing us with a multilayered perceptual experience through the active engagement of ‘seeing.
The newly presented series features paintings using the graze technique. By layering transparent paint, he creates hues with depth that cannot be achieved with a single color.In this series, only one leg of a four-legged chair is painted from an angle where it is invisible. The colors of the lower layers overlap with the transparent leg, oscillating between presence and invisibility.

Yohei Watanabe
Born in 1990, Fukushima Prefecture. Lives and works in Tokyo. Born in 1990, Fukushima Prefecture. Lives and works in Tokyo. Completed doctoral program at Tokyo University of the Arts. Selected exhibitions include “Spoon” HAGIWARA PROJECTS (20223, Tokyo), “Labender Hair” imlabor (2021, Tokyo), “The Mug Blues” LAVENDER OPENER CHAIR (2020, Tokyo), “Giant Chorus” (solo) HAGIWARA PROJECTS (2019, Tokyo), “4 boxes and pyramids” 4649 (2018, Tokyo), “Ultramarine” Kodama Gallery (2017, Tokyo), “Texture of Cat, Clouds Reversed in Retina” (solo) KomagomeSOKO (2017, Tokyo), “SPVI II” Turner Gallery (2015, Tokyo), “THE EXPOSED#9 passing pictures” g/p Gallery Shinonome (2015, Tokyo), “at work” Tokyo Art UnivercityYuga Gallery (2013,
Tokyo), etc.