ART CITIES:Paris-Kohei Nawa
Since completing a Ph.D in fine art sculpture from Kyoto City University of Art in 2003, Kohei Nawa has won several awards including the Kirin Art Award 2003, confirming his reputation as an up-and-coming young artist whose work is highly regarded both in Japan and overseas. Together with the influence of British sculpture derived from his experience as an exchange student at the Royal College of Art, one can also discern in Nawa’s works the development of the Japanese sculptural approach of focusing on the “outer layer”.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature Archive
The year 2018 marks the 160th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and France, as well as the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Meji period, when Japan opened up to the West. As part of the Japonisms 2018, Kohei Nawa presents his solo exhibition “PixCell Deer” at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. The works scattered in the permanent Collections of the Museum resume the themes dear to the artist who attempts to renew the sacred imagery. To this end, he mixes elements from traditional Japanese culture, Buddhism and Japanese Shintoism with images from contemporary technology. “PixCell” is 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. 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. 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. 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”. In his residence at Villa Kujoyama in 2015, Kohei Nawa has partnered with the Franco-Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet, himself very influenced by Japanese tradition and Shugendo rites. This common experience is born the work “Vessel” where the human body is used as a sculptural abstract material entanglement members giving rise to unusual shapes that reflect just a mirror of water. The video from this ballet is presented among the museum hunting weapons, near the sculptures he has inspired to Kohei Nawa.
Info: Curators: Claude Anthenaise and Sumiko Oe-Gottini, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, 62 rue des Archives, Paris, Duration: 4/9-2/12/18. Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-21:30, http://www.chassenature.org
