Kohei Nawa, who has finished successful solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo primally as the young artist, exhibits new works at Arario CheonAn and Seoul. 'Kohei Nawa - Trans' is the first large-scale exhibition in Korea, where his new 'Trans' series and 'Pixell' series will be showed.
His represent work is the sculpture series 'Pixcell', which is a compound word using 'pixel' which means the smallest area on a computer screen and 'cell'. Materials using in works have intrinsic attributes, such as weight, color and smell, but as they are covered with glass, crystal or urethane, those attributes lose essence. PixCell-Deer is taxidermied animal covered with transparent beads. It is like a recreated organism from fragmented texture and form of animal and beads. Different size of beads maximize color and shape and it attracts to audiences. The effect of beads seems to bother recognizing object clearly. However, our sense to recognize all things around us is actually uncertain and ambiguous. Kohei Nawa shows our desire for uncertain target we want to remember and hold through extensive expressions.
'PRISM' is a part of 'Pixcell' series, and sculpture inspired by motives from the internet. PRISM, a box containing an object inside and covered by prism paper, shows various images in terms of people's view. Then, an object in a box loses its reality, and weaken the meaning and symbolic value as unifying a sense of distance and motif. At the end, Nawa makes us to look back into actions of seeing, touching and feeling.
'MANIFOLD' is the big scale sculpture and composed of various shaped pipes. It is a set of circulation bodies which tells information, material and energy. And each entity evolves as changing the form to make surface smooth. This threatening work symbolizes the critical society by a flood of information and energy issues. It is in progress of manufacture and will be installed at Arario CheonAn in November. It is unparalleled art project and overwhelming size. Watching this work can be confused but people can feel unearthliness beyond anxiety and fear
What Kohei Nawa wants to show through using various materials are emptiness and fear. These concepts are inspired from biological research and technology, and completed work looks like an organism made of several cells. He brings out the issues of social structure and system through imaginary existence.
