I first encountered Yu Kobayashi’s work during a visit with Dan John Anderson on a sun-drenched morning in Joshua Tree, CA. Touring through his self-made home and studio, we entered a room at the end of a long hallway. An abstract painting, bearing semblance to both a volcano eruption and a bird, was framed seamlessly into a gridded wall of wooden slats at the center of the artist’s bedroom. To the right, glass sliding doors opened up to a glittering landscape speckled with Yucca, brittlebush, and assemblages of lumber. Knowing everything was carefully crafted by Anderson himself, I paused and asked who made the painting inset to the wall that seemed to have been built around it. He replied with a smile, “That’s Yu Kobayashi.”

This exhibition is the story of their friendship. From one end of the Pacific to the other, Japanese artist Yu Kobayashi (b. 1957, Aichi, JP) and Californian artist Dan John Anderson (b. 1977, Spokane, WA) each built their own studios by hand, including most of the furniture and even the ceramic tableware used daily. Their work is synonymous with the physical catalysts of life, and the external elements that shape it. Whether Kobayashi is painting on the ground or Anderson is sculpting outside in the desert, their works are beaten by wind, aged by sun, and inspired endlessly and wholeheartedly by a restless need to be outdoors – to hike, to swim, and to play out their daily joie de vivre.

“There is an overwhelming sense of truth, sincerity, and strength that emanates from the very essence of being human and alive,” recalls artist and common friend Kazunori Hamana on Kobayashi's work. “In a way, her work is nothing more than the lingering traces of her energy.”

In conversation with the abundant nature surrounding Sea View, a concept space built into a hillside peppered by eucalyptus and agave, Kobayashi’s gestural paintings and Anderson’s abstract functional sculptures give form to the invisible and natural forces that nourish an otherwise static and untenable modern life. 

– Sara Lee Hantman