When I was younger, I had one of those blocky televisions that would start with an incessant hiss. I used to press my face to the staticky glass and look at the individual pixels change in intensity. Close up, the screen lost all semblance of familiarity, dissolving into blocks of red, blue, and green.

It could be said that everything in this life is made up of bits and pieces. Consider the ovarian oocyte, for instance. A single bit, joined together with another bit to make a piece, that eventually becomes a larger piece and out comes a different system, made up of smaller pieces and even smaller bits. And so on. 

In understanding the world around us, Japanese-based sculptor Kohei Nawa has mediated a number of different variables from time, material, content of culture, to the singular cell. His landmark work, “PixCell-Deer #24,” was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013. He has led the vanguard of upcoming Japanese artists who seek to bring a perspective of Japanese culture that is not prescriptive of stereotypes and popular culture. 

Nawa’s ongoing series, PixCell, consisted of glass spheres affixed to taxidermied objects and other totems. The resulting sculpture was an interplay between synthetic and organic materials, where the cells break the found materials down into individual bits, magnifying textures to their essential forms. In Nawa’s world, nothing happens by accident and every material bit is carefully constructed to form. 

Kohei Nawa’s latest solo exhibition is named Sentient—located in the 200 year-old bathhouse that is now home to the Japanese leading post-war contemporary art gallery, SCAI THE BATHHOUSE. It is the culmination of two decades of experimental mixed-media creation from the Osaka-born artist.

In a departure from his previous collections like PixCell, Prism, and Catalyst—which focalized specific sculptural techniques—this latest exhibition, Sentient, proves a collection of Nawa’s endeavors to understand the material world. The 20 plus sculptural works in this show are the result of the artist’s long-standing themes, remastered and reappraised as our contemporary world evolves. With found objects falling into the twilight zone of universal recognizability, these immaterial visions reveal the dissected anatomy of Nawa’s work bench; one where he has gathered experimental fragments and sculptural motifs throughout the years—transmuting familiar objects into contemporary ideas of the natural world and our very biological makeup. 

Since the inception of his practice in school, Nawa has employed found materials, looking through flea markets and online auction houses. Examining the contemporary cultural significance, “Objects found in these markets often carry traces of life: embedded histories, vernacular sensibilities, and cultural residues unique to their place of origin. These private and local elements are flattened and anonymized in the marketplace, drifting into unexpected contexts,” Nawa contemplates.

“This dynamic has only intensified in the age of global online auctions, accelerating the movement and circulation of objects across time, space, and genre. The works I select from this chaos exist in a state of tension—between self and other, consciousness and unconsciousness, intention and chance, meaning and meaninglessness. My practice, in a sense, is an attempt to introduce new connections and disjunctions into this state of flux.” In a world converted to 1s and 0s, the objects that hold concrete evidence of the material world have collapsed in on itself without the appropriate context. 

“Cells in the Grotto” follows PixCell, it seems, but instead of refracting a texture of an object, the cell becomes a standalone piece containing each mineral. “Some of the materials sealed within the cells are also imbued with personal memory—animal meat, for instance, stands out in this regard. This approach also appears in my Meat in a Cell series, which is based on a prototype I developed during my university years. At the time, I was investing all of my resources into making art, and there were periods when I survived on nothing but cabbage and canned corned beef. I remember how the glossy surface of the meat, once removed from the can, had a sheen that reminded me of polished marble. I was working on “PixCell-Sheep” around that period, and my thoughts were constantly revolving around the interrelationship between animals, plants, and minerals.”

Nawa continues: “That led me to create works such as “PixCell-Cabbage,” which took cabbage as its motif, as well as a prototype piece where the corned beef was sealed within a cell-like structure. The processed, industrially reformed appearance of the meat—designed for optimal circulation and consumption—struck me as a symbolic form of life under capitalism. In that moment, the thought occurred to me: Is this what life looks like when fully commodified?”

Beyond sculpture, the artist has also had a long-time collaboration with French Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet. Originally bonding over the deer-iconography present in Nawa’s PixCell Deer series and Jalet’s early short films titled “Les Meduses” (2013) or “The Ferryman” (2017), they have since recreated three realms described in the Japanese Kojiki, or the Record of Ancient Matters. 

“I see sculpture as a way of using materials as an entry point to evoke a specific ‘sensory field’ within the viewer. Even if a work is fixed in time and space as a physical object, it expands as a sensation, etched into each viewer’s body. In this way, sculpture and performance resonate with one another. Put differently, one could think of performance as a kind of sculpture that transforms over time—formless yet shaped by change. It’s similar to creating and unfolding multiple installations. Installations are typically completed when the viewer enters the space; the same holds true for performance, where I conceive of it as being complete only when the dancer’s body enters the sculptural realm. What kind of worldview does the stage embody? How does each scene unfold?” 

“Mirage” is the latest installment of this series. With a soundtrack created by Thomas Bangalter (one half of legendary electronic band Daft Punk), the wanderers of the piece face harsh, unrelenting environments. and foreign terrains. “Based on these foundations, I construct the relationships between body and material, body and space. In recent years, I’ve also been developing methods to translate the dancer’s physicality and movement into sculptural forms, re-expanding what is born on stage back into sculpture. Through this, I’ve been working to move fluidly back and forth between sculpture and performance, in a kind of ongoing loop.”

“Contemporary society,” Nawa considers, “in the face of escalating environmental crises, is being forced to shift away from the modernist paradigm of urban civilization. Yet, it remains unclear what we should believe in next.” It’s a relatively Aldous Huxleyan view of the future, but he asserts, “At the heart of Mirage lies the image of people in an unstable era who, even knowing what they see may be an illusion—or a kind of mirage—cannot help but pursue a new vision.”