Kohei Nawa’s works fuse the natural and virtual realms through exquisite studies in form and perception. He probes the interface between our senses and external objects — increasingly mediated by technology — and explores how our understanding of the world is informed from this interplay. His sculptures, installations and drawings reference both the fundamental structure of matter, as well as how surfaces function — their reflectivity, tactility and role as bearers of information — bringing what he calls ‘an analogue approach to the realization of a digital idea’.¹

Nawa’s fascination with surfaces, and the highly finished aesthetic of his work, is often linked to the Superflat movement championed by Takashi Murakami.² Superflat’s focus on expressing ‘Japanese-ness’, however troubling, is of little interest to Nawa though. Like many of his generation, his references are global, inspired as much by time spent in London, Berlin and New York, as the Buddhist and Shinto art and architecture he encountered living in Kyoto. He recently stated:

Maybe there was a time when artists benefited from, or used Japanese stereotypes in their work. But I think my generation no longer feels the need to identify with, or try to represent, Japan.³

Rather, Nawa is drawn to systems and processes that transcend cultural specificity or individual expression, such as how we identify with our surroundings through our physical senses — everything around us is a series of light-reflecting surfaces and everything we perceive by touch is covered by some kind of skin. His eye-catching ‘BEADS’ and ‘PRISMS’ sculptures transform found objects through the addition of layers of transparent glass or resin beads, or by placing them inside prismatic structures. The artist frustrates our desire to see or touch the objects, suggesting a disjunction between what we feel with our bodies and how we receive and process information in the digital age.

For his ‘BEADS’ sculptures — part of a body of work titled ‘PixCell’ (an invented term combining ‘pixel’ and ‘cell’) — Nawa undertakes a systematic process meshing virtual images from the internet with real objects. Through online keyword searches, he finds an item and captures it as an image on a computer screen, what he calls ‘first contact’. Once the object has been acquired and physically delivered (‘second contact’), Nawa proceeds to the next stage of altering the appearance of the object through the transformative application of beads in various sizes to create a finished work of art.

By using glass and resin beads, Nawa attempts to recreate the properties of the virtual image in physical form; each artwork is a component in a project recapturing something of the ‘original’, pixelated computer image. PixCell-Double Deer#4 2010 extends this method to embrace the organisational processes of digital data. Two taxidermied deer, sourced online, have been fused together in a form of doubling, similar to ‘copying and pasting on the computer with the shift key held down’.⁴ The identical poses of the deer, enabled by the increasing use by taxidermists of standard moulds, disturbs our understanding of the animal as unique; when given the same exterior coating of beads, they become uniform, not unlike their interchangeable representation on an online auction site. Yet, the result is resolutely aesthetic. The skin of beads fractures, magnifies and distorts the animal forms, transforming them into particles of deconstructed light and dramatically altering our perception, which continues to shift as we move around the sculpture.

Kohei Nawa explores the ambiguous and unstable nature of reality in an environment of ‘big data’ and exponentially expanding images, and questions ‘our pre-existing sensations and cognition through a slippage between image and substance, information and materiality’.⁵

Adapted from an essay by Michael Hawker, ‘Kohei Nawa: Seeing is believing’, The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], pp.144–5.

Endnotes

1. Kohei Nawa, quoted by David Elliott, in Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art [exhibition catalogue], Japan Society, New York, and Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2011, p.29.
2. Nawa’s multidisciplinary studio SANDWICH could also be seen as reminiscent of Murakami’s own Kaikai Kiki Co.
3. Hiroko Tabuchi, ‘Kohei Nawa shifts stereotypes and shapes’, International New York Times, 28 October 2013, viewed 22 April 2014.
4. Kohei Nawa, ‘Open “SYNTHESIS”’, in Tomoe Moriyama, Kohei Nawa – Synthesis [exhibition catalogue], Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2011, p.82. 
5. Akira Asada, ‘Between image and substance’, in Moriyama, p.227.

Feature image: A view of PixCell-Double Deer#4 installed for ‘We Can Make Another Future’, GOMA, February 2015 / © The artists / Photograph: N Harth, QAGOMA