Erika Kobayashi / 小林 エリカ

Born in 1978, in Tokyo, Japan.
Lives and works in Tokyo.

Erika Kobayashi is a Tokyo-based writer and artist whose work moves between novels, comics, and installation. Drawing on deep archival research, she excavates what history has rendered invisible — radiation, inherited trauma, and the lives of women erased from the official record.
As a visual artist, Kobayashi creates text-driven installations that resonate with her literary work.

Recent exhibitions include passing the fugitive on at the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2025); Hirosaki Encounters (Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Aomori, 2022); and Image Narratives: Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art (The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2019). Her three-volume comics series Children of the Light (Little More) Seeing the Light translated by Winnifred Bired, designed by Brennan Kelly (arbaro books)traces over 120 years of the cultural and scientific history of radioactivity.