Before Words Arise

This book is a collection of 591 pieces created over a nine-month period, from September 2023 to May 2024. The postcard-sized pieces are presented (almost) life-size, revealing the subtle nuances and traces of Kobayashi Ikki’s hand-drawn lines.

The impetus for this project was a question Kobayashi had while spending time with children: “What is the difference between what I perceive as ‘good stone’ and what a child perceives as a ‘good stone?’” While we are educated about the common criteria for what constitutes a ‘good stone’ — smoothness, beautiful shape, shine, etc. — children’s eyes may be encountering stones from a perspective unfamiliar with those criteria. Kobayashi believed that “the important thing is to capture the moment the eye captures the object. Perhaps this moment, just before words catch up with the object, is the only moment that is close to the relationship between a child and a stone.” Based on this hypothesis, Kobayashi took notes of things that caught his eye in his daily life and drew them by hand on postcard-sized paper, thereby confronting and exploring his own latent preferences for shapes as a graphic designer. What is happening inside our bodies before words arise, when we judge the countless shapes we unconsciously see every day as good/bad, like/dislike? This book is devoid of explanatory text and is simply a series of works and shapes, truly a book “before they arise.”

Kobayashi Ikki is a graphic designer and a part-time lecturer at Joshibi University of Art & Design and Tama Art University.

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