Kohei Nawa: Cosmic Sensibility
Pace Gallery, Seoul
November 22, 2023 – January 6, 2024
Spark#6 (detail), 2023
© Kohei Nawa
Pace presents an exhibition of new works by KOHEI NAWA at its Seoul gallery. The presentation, titled Cosmic Sensibility, marks the artist’s first solo show at Pace’s gallery in the Korean capital. Bringing together paintings and sculptures from five bodies of work—including the new Spark series—this exhibition showcases Kohei Nawa’s deep and enduring interest in the perceptual, sensorial, and phenomenological possibilities of art.
Kohei Nawa often examines scientific and digital subjects through his multidisciplinary practice. Making use of various traditional and unconventional materials—and drawing out their unique properties—for his work across painting, sculpture, and installation, the artist explores the nuanced relationships between physical and virtual spaces; synthetic and natural forces; and the individual and the collective. Visual distortions and transformations cut across Kohei Nawa’s works, encouraging viewers to consider the ways that digital technologies impact their relationship to and experience of the physical world.
The five bodies of works the artist shows in his exhibition speak to his longstanding interest in visual distortions and paradoxes. With Cosmic Sensibility, Kohei Nawa invites viewers to immerse in the wonders and mysteries of the vast universe. The exhibition's central concept—the ways that our individual lives are entwined in the fabric of the cosmos—pays homage to artist Hitoshi Nomura, who died in October 2023 and is known for his deeply experimental, process-based work. A teacher and mentor of Kohei Nawa, Hitoshi Nomura remains an enduring and profound influence on the artist’s work across mediums.
Kohei Nawa’s show begins on the ground floor of the gallery, where the visitors encounter a new sculpture from his iconic PixCell series along with the mixed-media installation Biomatrix (W) (2023), which traces the generation and flow of cellular forms within a canvas of flowing silicone oil, and works from the artist’s Ether sculpture series, based on 3D modeling of a highly viscous liquid in various stages of descent. Exhibited in conversation with one another, these artworks reflect the abstract, textural qualities of individual and aggregated cells.
On the gallery's second floor, the exhibition transports viewers into a world of proliferating cells, spotlighting a group of new sculptures from the PixCell series. These sculptures feature transparent spheres, or cells, covering their surfaces. The cells transform and distort viewers' perceptions of the forms beneath—a visual phenomenon that speaks to the impact of digital technologies on individuals' relationships to the world around them. The new PixCell sculptures that Nawa exhibit in "Cosmic Sensibility" feature strange combinations of antique furniture and other miscellaneous objects.
While referencing the international history of Surrealism, these works also engage with issues of the present moment— particularly the ways that innovations in virtual reality and artificial intelligence blur the boundary between the physical and virtual worlds.
Other highlights in the exhibition include bold, enigmatic sculptures from the artist's new, never-before-exhibited Spark series, which are finished entirely in solid black. With these works—each composed of velvet, and a carbon fiber rod— Kohei Nawa meditates on a rift in the fabric of reality caused by the energy of agitated cells. The presentation also spotlights his Rhythm series, which features combinations of variously sized shapes covered in velvet and situated atop two- dimensional planes. Reflecting the aesthetic concerns of his PixCell sculptures, Kohei Nawa's mesmeric Rhythm works explore the cyclical, energetic complexities of the natural world.
KOHEI NAWA (b. 1975, Osaka, Japan) is a multidisciplinary sculptor whose diverse practice explores the perception of virtual and physical space and probes the borders between nature and artificiality. He examines relationships between the individual and the whole, illustrating how parts aggregate together, like cells, to create complex and dynamic structures. His work spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, as well as various facets of design and collaborative projects through his Kyoto-based studio, Sandwich. Kohei Nawa’s use of synthetic compounds underscores a recurring theme wherein materials such as polyurethane foam, translucent beads, ink, paint, glue, and silicone oil become devices that prompt an awareness of our mediated environment.
PACE SEOUL
267 Itaewon-ro, Seoul
