Makoto Kojima's work examines the psychological and architectural textures of the zenith American suburb: Troy, Michigan.
b. 1978
Painting, drawing, photography, installation
Born in 1978, Kojima has spent the majority of his career returning to Troy, Michigan, a city whose cul-de-sacs, shopping malls, industrial parkways, office corridors, and residential subdivisions have become the central subjects of his artistic practice. Working across painting, drawing, photography, and installation, he approaches Troy not simply as a geographic location, but as a continuously evolving system of images, habits, and spatial arrangements.
Kojima first encountered Troy as a visitor, observing the city from the partial distance of someone both immersed in and separated from its daily life. Over time, repeated visits transformed this initial estrangement into a sustained form of attention. He began documenting the city's seemingly ordinary spaces: curved residential streets ending in circular turnarounds, detached houses positioned behind carefully measured lawns, broad industrial parkways lined with low-slung corporate buildings, parking lots extending beyond the edges of commercial structures, and enclosed malls organized around fountains, atriums, food courts, and artificial light. These environments offered Kojima a visual language through which to consider repetition, mobility, privacy, consumption, labor, and the construction of belonging.
The cul-de-sac is a recurring structure in Kojima's work. He treats it as both an architectural form and a psychological condition: a road designed to terminate, yet also to circulate; a communal space whose houses face one another while remaining privately enclosed. In his paintings and drawings, the cul-de-sac often appears emptied of people, reduced to driveways, garage doors, ornamental trees, mailboxes, and arcs of pavement. Subtle variations among nearly identical structures become charged with meaning. A basketball hoop, a parked vehicle, an illuminated window, or a recycling bin may function as evidence of an unseen domestic life.
Troy's industrial parkways form a parallel landscape within Kojima's practice. Defined by divided roads, landscaped setbacks, reflective office façades, loading entrances, retention ponds, and anonymous corporate signage, these spaces occupy a threshold between architecture and infrastructure. Kojima is particularly interested in the way they are designed to be seen in motion, most often through the windshield of a car. Their buildings appear self-contained and monumental from a distance, yet often remain inaccessible to the casual pedestrian. In his work, the industrial parkway becomes a stage for the largely invisible systems of administration, manufacturing, logistics, and technical labor that support suburban life.
The city's shopping malls have exerted an equally important influence. Kojima is drawn to the mall as an interior counterpart to the suburban street — a controlled, climate-regulated environment designed to simulate public life while directing movement through commerce. His depictions of malls frequently emphasize transitional spaces rather than storefronts themselves: escalators, tiled walkways, seating areas, reflective surfaces, vacant display windows, and corridors leading toward anchor stores. These spaces are represented less as symbols of abundance than as unstable architectures of memory, shaped by changing patterns of retail, leisure, and social interaction.
Kojima's work is particularly attentive to the expansive scale of southeastern Michigan. Troy's broad roads, industrial corridors, and dispersed commercial zones appear strange and theatrical, yet also intimate through familiarity. The city becomes a place in which Kojima can study how built environments shape emotional experience — how distance can produce isolation, how uniformity can intensify small differences, and how spaces designed for convenience accumulate private and collective histories. His repeated attention to these environments allows supposedly generic features to emerge as distinct, layered, and culturally specific.
Although his imagery is grounded in observation, Kojima does not approach Troy as a documentary subject in a conventional sense. Buildings, roads, and interiors are often simplified, recombined, or rendered from memory. Perspective may be subtly distorted, and familiar spaces may appear suspended outside a specific time of day or historical moment. This ambiguity allows Troy to function simultaneously as a real Midwestern city and as an imagined suburb: a landscape of arrival, repetition, temporary residence, labor, and return.
Across his practice, Kojima treats the suburban environment as a living archive. His work asks what forms of meaning can be found in places commonly dismissed as generic, and how sustained attention might transform standardized landscapes into sites of emotional and cultural specificity. Through his long engagement with Troy, he has developed a body of work concerned with the quiet contradictions of contemporary suburban life — its openness and enclosure, intimacy and anonymity, productivity and vacancy, permanence and continual redevelopment.