OB

Often associated with Japan’s ‘SNS generation’ (i.e. the generation that grew up with social media), ob translates digital-era feelings—intimacy, vulnerability, and self-transformation—into meticulously layered, hand-painted images that move between anime aesthetics, fantasy illustration, and contemporary figurative painting.

Early years and Background

Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1992, ob emerged alongside Japan’s social media boom and quickly became known as one of the key artists of the country’s SNS generation in the 2010s. While studying in Kyoto, she organised exhibitions and developed a distinct visual language, circulating her images online and building an early following through digital platforms before consolidating her practice within the gallery system.

Based in Japan, ob has worked closely with Perrotin and Kaikai Kiki, Takashi Murakami‘s gallery, positioning her within a wider ecology of Japanese contemporary art that engages both otaku visual culture and global painting discourse. Her participation in Perrotin’s travelling group exhibition Healing, curated by Murakami during the Covid-19 pandemic, further anchored her among an international roster of artists concerned with emotion, care, and connection in times of crisis.

ob Artworks

ob’s artworks typically feature pale, androgynous girl protagonists with oversized eyes and attenuated limbs, suspended in atmospheric, pastel-toned spaces filled with everyday objects that become charged with psychic intensity. Drawing from manga, illustration, and game design while insisting on the slowness of painting, she layers fine brushwork, gradients, and textures to create surfaces that feel simultaneously digital and deeply material.

The artist’s paintings have been described as visualisations of ‘moe’—a Japanese term for affective attachment to fictional characters—which she reimagines as a space for self-projection and quiet transformation rather than escapism. Works often stage her figures in transitional states—floating, dissolving, or gazing back at the viewer—inviting open-ended narratives rather than fixed storylines.

Key series and developments

Participation in the group exhibition Healing (Perrotin, including Seoul, Tokyo and other locations, curated by Takashi Murakami, 17 October–28 November 2020) presented ob’s paintings within a context of artworks responding to collective feelings of loss, separation, and enforced new lifestyles during the pandemic, and led directly to her New York solo debut.

Her first solo exhibition with Perrotin New York, Your, My, Story (3 November–23 December 2021), transformed the gallery into a dreamscape where viewers could project their own narratives onto the characters and settings, foregrounding connection with ‘real people’ as a core aim of her work.

Subsequent solo exhibitions, including Water Line at Perrotin Hong Kong (14 September–9 November 2024), have expanded her vocabulary of submerged and floating motifs, exploring states of suspension and emotional flux through recurring aquatic imagery and delicate shifts in colour and light.

The upcoming Perrotin New York exhibition Phantom Tales (16 January–21 February 2026) presents new paintings and drawings in which familiar objects and figures appear like after-images or echoes, further developing ob’s interest in memory, spectral presence, and stories that unfold between physical and virtual worlds.

Exhibitions and Collections

Selected solo exhibitions

• Phantom Tales, Perrotin, New York
• Water Line, Perrotin, Hong Kong
• Your, My, Story, Perrotin, New York
• Solo exhibitions at Perrotin in Taipei and Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo and other Asian cities

Selected group exhibitions

• Healing, curated by Takashi Murakami, Perrotin, including presentations in Seoul and Tokyo
• A Personal View of Japanese Contemporary Art: Takahashi Ryutaro Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo

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Ocula | 2026