36 hong kong tatler. august 2019CONCIERGE / ArtA scaled-down version of Throne is being shown this
month at Pace Gallery in H Queen’s in an exhibition of
works from some of Nawa’s most famous series, including
PixCell, which sees him cover taxidermy animals with
hundreds of clear glass spheres ranging in size from a ping
pong ball to a football.
“Those PixCell [glass spheres] are a lens,” explains Nawa.
“They reflect today’s vision through the lenses of TV and
the net, and the billions of eyes created by digital cameras.
The PixCell, Biomatrix, and Prism series, as well as Throne,
question the future of humanity and nature.”
Deer regularly appear in the PixCell series, either as wall-
mounted stag heads or in full-body form, with hundreds
of glass baubles stretching from their hooves to the tips
of their antlers. “In traditional Japanese art, the deer is
often depicted as a companion of ancient sages and has
auspicious and poetic associations. People believed they
were messengers from nature and the gods; it is a sacred
animal. By featuring deer, I wish to create a context where
the fusion of traditional and the new exists.”
Although he focuses on sculpture, Nawa also
expresses himself through other media. In 2008, he
founded Sandwich, a multidisciplinary studio that brings
together artists, architects and all kinds of designers to
collaborate on projects ranging from the interiors of
Starbucks stores to the design of the Kohtei pavilion, a
memorial at Shinshoji Zen Museum and Gardens to sailors
who lost their lives at sea. Nawa has also worked with
choreographer Damien Jalet on Vessel, a contemporary
dance production for which Nawa designed the set. Vessel
was first shown in Japan in 2016 but has since been staged
in Australia and various cities around Europe.
Vessel was in some ways the antithesis of Nawa’s slick
and seamless sculptures. A reflection on the circle of life,
the messy performance featured near-naked dancers sinking
in and out of what appeared to be a primordial soup,
dramatically expressing themes of life and death as well as
the connections between humanity and nature.
These ideas are also central to many of Nawa’s
sculptures, but unlike during the visceral Vessel, they’re
buried beneath his works’ glossy veneers. Perhaps this is
the greatest irony of Nawa’s art: that he’s used technology
so successfully to create such appealingly sleek sculptures
that some gallery-goers excitedly reach for their camera
phones on sight, becoming slaves to technology in exactly
the way Nawa fears. But even though Nawa has seen this
reaction at his exhibitions around the world and knows
that most people see his art on screens rather than in
person, he doesn’t think technology is ruling our lives—at
least not yet. “Technology can be a source for good; it
depends what wedecide to develop it for,” he says. “That
iswhatisatstake.”Kohei Nawa: Recent Works runs until August 29 at Pace Gallery in
H Queen’s, Hong Kong IMAGES, PREVIOUS SPREAD: KOHEI NAWA, PIXCELL-FALLOW DEER#2 (2015) AND KOHEI NAWA, PIXCELL-RABBIT#5 (2019), BOTH © KOHEI NAWA AND COURTESY OF PACE GALLERY; YOSHIKAZU INOUE (VESSEL). THIS SPREAD: THRONE (G/P_PYRAMID) (2019), PHOTO BY NOBUTADA OMOTE/SANDWICH, © KOHEI NAWA AND COURTESY OF PACE GALLERY“I wish to create
a context where
the fusion of
traditional and the
new exists”
STRIKING GOLD
Throne (g/p_pyramid)
(2019) is on show at Pace
Gallery this month