Japanese artist (b. 1975), based in Kyoto, where he runs the SANDWICH studio. Works the surface and state of things: the PixCell sculptures sheathed in glass beads, foam and liquid pieces, and VESSEL, the dance film made with the choreographer Damien Jalet, bodies caught between solid and liquid.
Provenance - where he pointed
Pointed at by Namjoon.
Namjoon archived Kohei Nawa: Cosmic Sensibility at Pace Gallery (Seoul), 2023, on his @rkive Instagram. A solo of Nawa’s, the finger landing on the artist himself.
Referenced via Pace Gallery exhibition page
origin: convergence. I’d already met Nawa on my own, his VESSEL at the Arario Museum in Space in 2022, a year before RM’s post. He confirmed the door rather than opened it, the same way Mark Rothko did.
Why it matters - the door
(draft, for me to revise.) The body changing state: liquid to solid, animate to inanimate. VESSEL puts the dancers on a material that clumps when gripped and dissolves when released, so the figure is always at the threshold of losing its edge. That threshold (the form at the point of vanishing) is the axis this garden keeps returning to.
Grows into
Met on my own at Arario Museum in Space, 2022:
- VESSEL - the dance film with Damien Jalet, the body between solid and liquid.
- [[PixCell-Double-Deer|PixCell-Double Deer#7]] - the glass-sphere double deer, the form fixed but the surface dissolving into points of light.
Related seeds
- Alberto Giacometti - the other sculptor of the figure at the edge of dissolving, from the opposite direction (eroded bronze, not shifting matter).