Marie Higashi
Born in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture in 1991, Marie Higashi began her professional life as a nurse before turning to painting in 2017 during a period of personal crisis. Her experience in surgery rooms, witnessing the fragile line between life and death, profoundly shaped her vision of fragility, resilience, and impermanence. What began as a personal act of healing grew into a sustained artistic practice.
Higashi paints on wooden panels using a layered and subtractive process. She begins with a white primer, then applies acrylic paint in several coats. Through scratching, rubbing, and scraping, she removes pigment to reveal underlying textures. She often incorporates mineral pigments, charcoal, animal glue, or tea, each leaving organic traces. For her, scars, marks, and voids are not imperfections but essential elements of expression, echoing Japanese aesthetics of wabi-sabi and mono no aware. Her works embody a cycle of destruction and regeneration, where every surface becomes a record of vulnerability, resilience, and renewal.
Higashi states: '«There are countless ways of thinking in this world, yet reality is far too complex to be completely grasped. I want to question that complexity. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death — all seem to coexist in constant contradiction. Through my work, I seek to express something vivid, to speak about the cruelty that inhabits this world.
And still, I believe that the true beauty lies in life and the world as they are.»
