ART-PRESENTATION: Kohei Nawa-Trans-figure
Kohei Nawa is at the forefront of a new generation of Japanese creative minds, grouped in an old sandwich factory located outside Kyoto, named SANDWICH, whose aim is to overstep popular labels of manga and anime in order to offer a less obvious view of Japanese contemporary art and culture. Buddhism and Shintoism intertwine in his work, but it would be reductive to limit his references to these two philosophical doctrines. The work of Kohei Nawa is something more complex. The whole universe with its cells and cellular structures becomes vehicle of the artist’s expression.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
Moving fluidly between different media, Nawa’s work explores themes of science and digital culture while challenging viewers’ sensory experiences. Interested in industrial mass-production, Nawa often works with synthetic compounds, using them to consider the ideas of the real and the virtual, and perception versus illusion. In Kohei Nawa’s solo exhibition “Trans-figure” are on presentation works from his ongoing series “Direction”, “Ether”, “PixCell” and “Villus”, that his powerful meditations on sensation and materiality. A highlight of the exhibition is a “PixCell” sculpture of a taxidermied maral deer. “PixCell” is a term coined by connecting the words pixel, the smallest portion of a digital image, with cells. Images of chosen objects are digitalized and encapsulated in a layer of spheres; the same process is then applied to the physical piece by covering it with a layer of glass beads. While the glass beads create a different system of representation through matter, the various dimensions of the spheres create the effect of a lens and a unique, deep, and continuous view.
The work resonates with a type of religious painting known as a Kasuga Deer Mandala, which features a deer (the messenger animal of Shinto deities)posed similarly with its head turned to the side, and with a round sacred mirror on its back. In Japanese art, the deer is often depicted as a companion of ancient sages and has auspicious and poetic. For his work the artist says “The approach of making sculpture from granular materials eventually emerged when I was searching for my own means of expression, and is associated with the concept that the whole world is made from cells and cellular structures. At the molecular level, all natural and man-made articles are groups of particles. Also, if you look at animal cells, they are full of DNA and other forms of information. I work from the concept that the cell itself represents information, and also gives the material its shape”. Similarly, the works in the “Villus” series include a variety of objects upon which the artist applies a Polyurethane foam, creating a mist that masks the irregularities of the surface and dulls the contours and textures. In his “Direction” paintings, Nawa pours black paint onto a vertically set canvas. He offsets the grain of the canvas on the stretcher by fifteen degrees, and then allows the paint to slowly drip down the face of the canvas, allowing the force of gravity to produce the lines of the painting. Works from the “Ether” series, which can be presented outdoors as well as indoors, translate highly viscous liquids into a solid state at the moment they drip downward. Appearing as a three-dimensional sculpture, the iterative forms of the droplets appear as an endless column and visualize the force of gravity.
Info: Pace Gallery, 229 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, Duration: 18/1-25/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, sun 11:00-17:00, www.pacegallery.com
