Kobayashi was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1957 and graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts (B.A.) with a major in Oil Painting in 1984. He moved to Ghent, Belgium in 1997 with the guidance of Jan Hoet (1936-2014), a world-renowned curator and founder of Ghent Museum of Contemporary Art (Ghent, Belgium) before returning to Japan in 2006. Rather than starting with mounting the canvas onto a wooden frame while setting out to paint like most artists do, Kobayashi incorporates his artistic practice of stretching the canvas and paints concurrently. Therefore, hardly any of Kobayashi’s artworks form a proper rectangular structure. They are always fixed onto a precariously balanced, awry wooden stretcher. On the shaky frame, the artist places paints directly on his hands and smears onto the loosely attached canvas. It turns out to be an ingeniously pleasing piece of art. Kobayashi participated in the Biennale de São Paulo as a representative of Japan in 1996, and his major solo exhibitions includes “KOBAYASHI Masato”, The Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai (2000), “A Son of Painting Masato Kobayashi”, S.M.A.K. (Museum of Contemporary Art Ghent), Ghent, Belgium (2001) and “Starry Paint”, Tensta Konsthall, Sweden (2004), etc. Kobayashi is currently teaching as a professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts in Japan.