In the work of Kohei Nawa, matter is never inert. It breathes, refracts, dissolves, and reforms—caught in a constant state of becoming. His sculptures, at once futuristic and archaic, seem to exist in a liminal zone where scientific inquiry meets spiritual reflection. Born in Kyoto, a city steeped in ritual and craftsmanship, Nawa carries this cultural inheritance into a practice that probes the origins of life and the structure of the cosmos.

On the occasion of his exhibition Photon Camp at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles, Nawa’s work emerges not as a collection of objects, but as a sensory environment—an orchestration of light, surface, and perception.

The Alchemy of the PixCellhot

Nawa’s celebrated PixCell series, developed over more than two decades, begins with a deceptively simple gesture: coating objects with countless transparent glass spheres. Yet this act transforms the object into something unstable, optically charged. A taxidermied elk—most strikingly realized in PixCell-Elk#3—is rendered both hyper-visible and obscured, its surface fragmented into a constellation of magnified reflections.

The spheres function like pixels in a digital image, breaking reality into units of perception. The viewer’s gaze is disrupted, multiplied, refracted. The elk becomes less an animal than a field of data—an organism translated into information.

Nawa’s Direction and Moment series translate cosmic forces into painterly gestures. By tilting canvases and allowing pigment to fall under gravity, he relinquishes control, letting physical laws dictate form. Fine vertical lines emerge—delicate, almost hair-like—traces of gravity made visible.

In Moment, ink is dropped onto the canvas in motion, echoing the oscillation of a pendulum. The resulting patterns are both precise and unpredictable, embodying a tension between order and chaos.

These works do not depict the universe; they enact its principles. Gravity is not illustrated—it is performed.

Catalyst and Cellular Growth

In Catalyst (2019), Nawa uses a glue gun to “draw” textured, cellular structures across a surface. The material accumulates, spreads, and thickens, resembling microscopic life forms or topographical maps. The boundary between painting and sculpture dissolves, replaced by a hybrid form that invites both visual and tactile engagement.

Ritual, Memory, and the Void

The Sacred Without Doctrine

Despite his engagement with Buddhist imagery and Japanese folklore, Nawa resists fixed belief systems. His interest lies in the experience of ritual—the act of concentration, the sensation of disappearance. In moments of intense focus, he describes a feeling of “nothingness,” a state where the self dissolves into process.

This philosophy permeates his work. The artist is present, yet absent; the object exists, yet resists definition. Art becomes a site of transition rather than expression.

Trauma and Transformation

Memories of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the Great East Japan Earthquake haunt Nawa’s practice. These events inform his concept of “drifting objects”—forms that move, fragment, and reassemble across time and space.

In Photon Camp, this idea unfolds on a planetary scale. Objects appear suspended, as if carried by unseen currents. They evoke a world in flux, shaped by cycles of destruction and regeneration.

Between Sculpture and Performance

Bodies as Moving Matter

Nawa’s collaboration with Damien Jalet in the performance Vessel extends his sculptural concerns into choreography. Human bodies become kinetic forms, rising and collapsing in response to gravity. The stage transforms into a living sculpture, where motion replaces mass.

The work explores life and death as continuous processes—growth emerging from the earth, returning to it in time. Here, sculpture is no longer an object but an event.

Nawa’s large-scale installations engage directly with architectural space. His Throne (2018), presented at the Louvre Pyramid, reflects on power, history, and technological authority. Positioned within a structure that bridges past and present, the work mirrors this duality—one face oriented toward the future, the other toward the depths of history.

For Nawa, an artwork is not fixed. It exists only when light—photons—interacts with matter and perception. This idea reframes art as a fleeting phenomenon, a convergence of forces rather than a stable object.

His sculptures, whether composed of glass spheres, prisms, or flowing pigment, invite a reconsideration of reality itself. They ask how we see, how we understand, and how we situate ourselves within a universe that remains largely unknowable.

In this sense, Nawa’s work operates on multiple scales simultaneously: the microscopic and the cosmic, the material and the immaterial. It is an art of thresholds—where boundaries dissolve, and perception begins anew.