Studio Banana TV interviews up-and-coming Japanese artist Kohei Nawa. Nawa belongs to a new generation of Japanese artists that is erupting in the global contemporary art scene with fresh ideas. In the interview he talks about his Liquid, Beads, Scum series but also about other works with glue, drawing etc. He also explains his new endeavor, SANDWICH, a creative platform he has founded in Kyoto.
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He is best known for his ideas of ’skin’ and ‘cells’ encapsulated under the pixcell series. The ’skins’ of objects such as taxidermied animals, sneakers, musical instruments, toys and fake fruit taking on new phases. Countless transparent glass beads encase these objects, forming a new interface between these things and us. the glass beads are ‘cells’ that skew our tactile memories and conventional visual notions we have of these objects. Beads of glass are affixed to and mediate objects. Motifs used for the sculptures are gathered from the internet. entering specific keywords in the search engine results in the display of a myriad of unexpected related images. They cover the surface of these motifs with transparent spheres transforming them into ’shells of light’. Layers of countless ‘cells’ alter the texture and color of the original object, dissolving it into a pixelated image converted and saved into a sculptural format -’pixcell’ – a re-assemblage of element of image.
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Scum: motifs which could not be transformed through the pixcell process are used in the Villus series. The objects are subjected to a controlled airflow where they are exposed to a spray of polyurethane resin which chemically reacts in the air. as the particles attach to the skin of the motifs, they become the cell and behave like fur, covering the object in a villi-type manner, causing its volume to expand. The contours and texture of the original weightless image are diminished through the process and gradually disappear within the expanding impassive volume.
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Liquid indicates the fluid maternal space from which the cell bubbles form. By illuminating the layer of silicon oil a grid of bubbles is revealed. Sensation and images emerge from the neutral white interface. As the constant flow of stimulation reaches its maximum point of saturation, the work has an anesthetic effect towards the viewer.
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Kohei Nawa was born in Osaka, Japan in 1975. He graduated from the Kyoto City University of Art, Ph.D. specializing in fine art, sculpture. He lives and works in Kyoto. He works with the gallery Scai The Bathhouse from Tokyo.
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Special thanks to Makiko Seo and Ayano Otake from Hermes Tokyo, and to Yuichi Kodai.
Interview by Studio Banana TV. Translation by Yuichi Kodai and Claudia Maggi.
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[...] [ART iT] • Henk Visch and Ryue Nishizawa (Part 2) [ART iT] • Nobuyoshi Araki [Japan Times] • Kohei Nawa [Studio Banana TV] • Noriyuki Haraguchi [...]
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