Kohei Nawa “Oracle”
We visited Kohei Nawa’s solo exhibition “Oracle.” The venue is GYRE GALLERY on the third floor of the GYRE building in Omotesando.
Exhibited Works
The exhibition centered on new works produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, featuring numerous series pieces.
PixCell
“PixCell” is a sculptural work that covers an object with transparent spheres, transforming its existence into “cells of image.”
The object is collected via the internet and, like an image (an assembly of Pixels) appearing on a PC screen, is “sheathed” by countless Cells.
Once the whole surface is covered by spheres of varying sizes, the outer skin is divided into individual cells (PixCells), and the object comes to be “observed” through magnifying and distorting lenses.
Born amid the waves of globalism and advanced informatization, this series reflects the mutual relationship between the digital camera lens and the objects informatized through it, generating a visual-tactile experience that questions the reality of the surfaces of things.
*PixCell: a coined term combining Pixel and Cell.
Black Field
“Black Field” is a work whose subject is a “field” that continues to change state over several months due to the mixing properties of oil paint and oil.
The black oil paint layered on a board panel gradually oxidizes and hardens starting from the parts exposed to the air.
Throughout the run of this solo exhibition, the surface will continue to inscribe textures of contraction and rupture across the entire picture plane.
In the early stages of production, even smooth areas develop wrinkles over two to three weeks, and parts unable to withstand the tension of the skin end up tearing.
From the torn areas, liquid oil paint saturated with oil is exposed, and new reactions begin.
The process by which the phenomenon shifts into representation resembles soil enduring repeated cycles of wind, rain, and sunlight; the “cracks” also evoke the “stomata” in the epidermis of plants that open and close through changes in cell turgor pressure.
Trans
The form of a sacred deer flying to Kasuga on a cloud is emblematic within the art history of Nara, representing Takemikazuchi-no-Mikoto, the enshrined deity of the First Sanctuary of the Main Hall of Kasuga Taisha Shrine, descending from Kashima to Kasuga upon a deer.
Trans-Sacred Deer (g/p_cloud_agyo) takes as its motif the sacred deer of the “Kasuga Shinroku Shari Zushi (Reliquary of the Sacred Kasuga Deer),” said to have been created between the Kamakura and Nanboku-cho periods; data was produced on a 3D system, and the work was fabricated using traditional techniques such as wood carving, lacquering, and gold-leaf gilding.
The sacred deer itself takes on a cloud-like shape, and on the saddle upon its back is enshrined a flaming jewel resting on a lotus throne. As if summoning a divine messenger, it manifests in the present world after traversing eons of time.
Dune
“Tornscape” (2019), which applied the formation theory of Martian sand dunes as a program and used physical simulation to depict the transformation of a landscape according to types of flowing sand and meteorological conditions, was a video installation themed on the impermanence of the “Hojoki,” generating natural disasters and epidemics like a picture scroll.
The series “Dune” began from the trial-and-error question of whether such a transforming landscape could this time be expressed as drawing using actual paint, arising from the experience of collaborating with programmers on the computer.
“Dune” is a painting series in which multiple media, paints of varying granularity, water, and other materials are mixed together and spread across a support; a range of expressions arises from the relationship between the viscosity of the medium and the inclination of the support.
It is a horizontal deployment made by collecting and recycling the paint — the so-called waste effluent — that had flowed vertically down the canvas by gravity in “Direction.” The complex expressions arising from differences in material properties evoke the sensation of gazing from above at the relationship between meteorological phenomena and landscape.
Blue Seed
A UV laser is projected onto the surface of a semi-transparent panel coated with special pigment, drawing the cross-sectional silhouettes of 3D models themed on plant seeds and ovules. The line drawing, which temporarily discolors due to ultraviolet light and looks like ink that has soaked in blue, slowly disappears over the course of tens of seconds after it is generated. Scan lines appear one after another at a fine pitch, and their afterimages emerge as three-dimensional depictions of seeds and ovules.
Normally, the question in drawing is whether the image drawn by the creator becomes fixed on the support; in “Blue Seed,” however, the image does not become fixed on the support but is repeatedly generated by a computer program and disappears naturally.
The images of seeds and ovules, which carry the potential for growth as individuals, indicate the birth of life, the transience of existence, and permanence as a system maintained even while flickering on and off.
*Program: Ryo Shiraki / Soundscape: Marihiko Hara
Silhouette
Ascending the building’s escalator, the “Silhouette” series was also on view in the atrium space of GYRE.
“Silhouette” is a sculptural work that first appeared as stage design at concerts by pianist Koki Nakano held at Spiral Hall in Tokyo and ROHM Theatre Kyoto in Kyoto in 2018.
Volumes are constructed from surfaces of revolution derived from curves extracted from the melody of the sound, and the outer skin is covered by grains of silicon carbide that sharply reflect light.
When illuminated in darkness, the monumental impression of “Silhouette” recedes, and the surface emerges as a field of optical phenomena.Related to this work — treating the melody of sound as wave motion and translating it into sculpture — are the sculptural works “White Pulse” and “Ether.”
“White Pulse” (2012), commissioned as public art for Dover Street Market in Ginza, gives form to waves of energy passing through a tube and spreading outward.
In the courtyard garden of House F “Biota” (2013 / Setouchi Triennale) on Inujima, “Ether” — symbolically expressing the relationship between water, life, and gravity — is scattered throughout.
Both contain the dynamism of wave motion and energy within their quiet presence.
Catalyst
“Catalyst” is a form that begins from a point and continues to proliferate in a web as it crawls through space — an existence somewhere between sculpture and drawing.
Drawn directly onto walls, it can also become a site-specific installation.Thermoplastic glue, heated and liquefied in a glue gun, adheres to the support and then, once cooled, solidifies again and becomes fixed.
The accumulation of transparent glue lines develops into forms reminiscent of a growing neural network, or of the vines of plants and slime molds reaching for light. It appears as an impulse to defy the load of gravity by rising upward, as a horizontal spread like outstretched wings, and as forms like stems extending downward.The interstices between the inorganic and the organic. It questions the desires and instincts programmed into cells and the very essence of life. His first work using glue, “blackyarn” (2000 / Gallery Sowaka), was created during his graduate school years as he moved back and forth between sculpture and drawing, confronting the proposition of when consciousness inhabits matter or objects.
Moment
“Moment” is drawn by applying constant pressure to a tank filled with viscosity-adjusted paint, using paint that emerges from a nozzle.
Like the black silicone oil of “Force,” a single stream of paint flowing vertically downward under gravity gains horizontal force and begins to swing like a pendulum, tracing a variety of curves upon a horizontally placed support. In some cases, the tank is fixed in place and the support is moved instead. In the “Moment” for this solo exhibition, the latter method was used, and the works were drawn with the support repeatedly moving at high speed.The trajectories of such relative motion inscribed as “Moment” connect bodily sensation with imagery of dynamics and eternal motion in cosmic space — centrifugal force, the Coriolis force arising from the tilt of Earth’s axis, orbital motion, and the like.
By slightly reducing the pressure inside the tank, the line occasionally breaks, inscribing a fine rhythm; by controlling the density and sparseness of the accumulated lines, temporal and spatial depth arises on the picture plane. To show the connection with the actual sensations that appear in “Force” and “Direction,” the works were drawn with the same color and line width as “Force,” and trimmed at the same 15-degree angle as “Direction.”
Rhythm
“Rhythm” brings rhythm into space through the combination of spheres (cells) of varying sizes and the arrangement and composition thereof.
In “PixCell,” for example, arranging crystal glass spheres of various sizes gives objects a distinctive depth on the surface along with a flow of the gaze around them, generating an amplifying effect on vision. The thick bands and thin bands born from this group of large and small spheres translated in parallel also connect to “Direction.”
To simply demonstrate the sensation shared by other work series, light gray pile (short fibers) was flocked onto every surface of both the spheres and the support, finished as if in velvet and rendered uniform.
The genesis of this work was placing several wooden spheres on a board panel in the drawing room “DR” at his Tokyo base in Daikanyama. There was only a rhythm of spheres of varying sizes there, nothing more.
And yet, the strange sensation that such a neutral expression can also appear to be something else amid the COVID-19 pandemic is ironic but extremely interesting.
