MARIE HIGASHI

Born in 1991 in Sasebo City, Nagasaki Prefecture and graduating in 2012 from Sasebo City Nursing College, Higashi is a self-taught painter currently working in the Hyogo Prefecture. Higashi started painting in 2017 with a desire to explore “something beyond myself that I couldn't even call myself”. She has exhibited in both group and solo shows since 2018, with her first solo exhibition held in 2020 at Jinen Gallery.  She also received the 2019 Unknown Asia Jury and Reviewer Prize.

Her paintings are influenced by her own life and her experience as a nurse. In particular, the experience of working in the operating room where she saw the human body as both precise and surprisingly fragile. Overwhelmed by the mystery, horror, and splendor and the connection between humans, plants, animals, and all other forms of life, as well as this world, Higashi felt inspired by the process of recovery and healing, finding beauty in the strength of life that exists alongside fragility and weakness. There are many binary ideas in the world - front and back, good and bad, beauty and ugliness, life and death - and Higashi aims to express things that seem contradictory at first glance, but in a way that feels like they coexist.