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The 31st Artist Room “En” was started by textile artist Mariko Kobayashi on June 23, 2017 and completed on July 18, 2017.
Kobayashi chose Japanese word “en”, which means connections or relations as the theme of her Artist Room. There’s a time when you feel you have a bond with thins beyond the intentions and choices, which might give you these “en”, and guide you somewhere else. By using red strings, she visualized the invisible sense of “en” that lies inside Japanese people. Drawings of nature and animals connected by the red stings express the “en” that people have encountered in past, and will encounter in future.
Park Hotel Tokyo hope that guests staying in this room will be connected with good “en” to Japan, this room, and everything that happens to you in future.
Room #3101 | Completion Date: July 2017
In the days before the ‘materialistic and information-oriented society’, the Japanese had a receptive sense that “everything in nature has something to do with us”.
It is said there are hundreds of thousands of Shinto shrines in Japan, celebrating all the gods and goddesses. Japanese people find it aesthetically pleasing to be in awe of nature, trying to be together with nature rather than confront it, and their prayers and wishes to get an “en (connection)” may have arisen from this way of life.
For every turn of Fortune’s wheel, there’s a time when you feel you have a secret bond with the “supernatural” beyond your own intentions and choices, which might give you or deny you these “en”, and guide you somewhere else.
I think that in today’s changing times, we’ve forgotten that such inter-relationships do exist. We are connected with everything we encountered so far, and our world will continue to expand as it connects with everything we meet.
I hope that your “en” with Japan, this room, and everything that happens to you in future, will be good.
Mariko Kobayashi
Born in Osaka in 1987.
Completed graduate course in textile design at Tama Art University. In early childhood, she became interested in various living things, and her interest in the natural environment and animal protection activities grew. In our own lives, artificiality has been increasingly prevalent in recent years, and through art, she has been trying to show our increasingly fragile relationship with living creatures. One of the charms of her work is her unique expression of colors and materials: she breaks her materials and sews them up again, or blacks out what she already did, and paints it again.
Currently, she is actively creating large-scale artworks at places like public facilities so that she can bring her message to even more people.
