Painting by Soichi Watanabe, used with permission by the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC) at Princeton Theological Seminary. You can purchase this and many other artworks by artists in residence at the OSMC in high resolution and without a watermark via the OSMC website .
“A resident of Koshigaya City, Saitama, Japan, Soichi Watanabe was the 2008-09 OMSC artist in residence. Watanabe graduated in 1982 from the Ochanomizu Art School in Tokyo after having earned, a decade earlier, an economics degree from Tohoku Gakuin University in Sendai. He teaches at a private art school that he started in 1982. Following his 1982 graduation, Soichi founded a private art school where he and his wife work together to help others experience the joy of art.
“Soichi was drawn to God as an undergraduate student during a home Bible study when he encountered Mark 8:35: ‘Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.’ Further study of the New Testament led him to realize that he was both ‘stubborn and self-centered.’ He recalls that ‘the richness of the biblical world overwhelmed me and at the same time tortured me.’
“Shortly thereafter he chose to submit his life to God at an evening worship service. ‘I really heard a voice telling me to accept the salvation of Jesus on the cross and to follow him,’ remembers Soichi. From that point on he has been determined to serve God through his abilities. As a follower of Jesus, Soichi points to his faith as the foundation from which he works as an artist. In his art book Jesus Walking With Us (2004), he writes, ‘I realize that [my works] are my own humble responses to God’s calling in my life… . The images are often given to me through the words of God at worship services on Sundays and during my daily devotion. I have the earnest hope that I will go on painting to praise the Lord.'” (Source )
About this image, Watanabe says: “I have painted this subject twice. My first experience of this was being able to participate in the Nagel Institute Traveling Seminar in Indonesia, in June 2008, which had ‘Christianity, Contextualization, and the Visual Arts’ as its theme. I enjoyed fellowship there with Christian artists from different countries. My second experience was of being impressed with the Christian unity that exists in the OMSC community. In both cases, I experienced the unity that Christians have in Jesus.” (Source: OMSC 2010, p. 34)
Thomas Hastings, former director of the OMSC comments on this painting: “All One in Jesus. There are separate bodies, but they look so similar and they overlap. There are faces, and, differences exist between them, notably the faces are different colors, but they are also so similar in their lack of features.
“Counting the number of figures, it could be Jesus and the disciples. It could be the Last Supper and this could be Jesus. Looking at it that way we realize we all look like Jesus, or Jesus looks like each of us.
“One observation is that Watanabe minimized the particulars that can separate us from others to show we are all one people, regardless of where we come from. There is a sameness here, there is a union. We are one because all are all part of a common humanity. We are also one because we are at the table together, and the table encompasses us all. We are the body of Christ and members of one another.
“At the same time that we are one, there is also a differentiation. These are individual bodies, and faces. There is some specificity, not an undifferentiated mass. There is a spiritual reality here, of a one-ness that exists. There is a material specificity here, that individual bodies exist and the two can’t be separated.” (Source )