Interviews, Issue 8

Kohei Nawa

Boundaries between Virtual and Real

Words YUKO HASEGAWA

Photography EDVINAS BRUZAS

Born in Osaka, Japan, Kohei Nawa is a visionary whose work spans the tangible and the ephemeral. His unique technique involves cloaking the surfaces of stuffed animals and figurines collected from the Internet with large and small transparent spheres. Additionally, he envelops everyday objects and toys in a layer of polyurethane foam, transforming their physical weight into mere visual impressions. This blurs the boundaries between virtual and real, reflecting contemporary visual realities.

Nawa’s creative sanctuary, operated from his studio, Sandwich, in Kyoto, explores a broad spectrum of artistic disciplines, from art and architecture to scenography. Central to his oeuvre is the concept of movement—be it the intrinsic motion found in the laws of physics, such as gravity and centrifugal force, or the dynamic energy of his own physical gestures. These elements coalesce within his work, drawing from the profound interplay of time and space.

YUKO HASEGAWA: First, can you tell us the story of how you became a sculptor and where your interest in form first took root?

KOHEI NAWA: From a young age, I spent my time drawing and crafting. I grew up in an environment where everything could be transformed into art supplies, materials, or toys. This creative environment was heavily influenced by my father, who was an elementary school teacher and also was deeply involved in the “Children’s Play and Manual Labor Research Society,” commonly known as “Terouken (Manual Labor Research).” He used to organize workshops like “Adventure School,” which involved taking the kids to the mountains for camping, crafting utensils and toys from bamboo, using simple tools like the Higonokami knife, and cooking over open fires. The whole point was to develop children’s cognitive abilities and enhance their sensory perception through play and hands-on activities.

My early fascination extended to photography, sparked by my father’s hobby. From elementary school onward, I explored photography, developing and enlarging photos in a darkroom we set up at home. I also found joy in observing celestial bodies through a small telescope, which eventually led to my role in our school’s astronomy club in fifth grade. We were fascinated by astronomical observation every weekend, capturing star trails with long exposure photography using our telescope. The idea that distant objects could be seen up close through a lens and that the starlight we were observing had traveled light-years to reach us, making it light from the past, was incredibly captivating.

And my curiosity didn’t stop there—I was captivated by microscopes, inspired by the profound scientific discoveries they enabled. The ability to observe the vast and the minute, from distant galaxies to microscopic cells, fascinated me. This extended into my artistic endeavors, where I experimented with pinhole cameras, slide projectors, and electronic circuits integrating sensors and LEDs. I enjoyed all the sciences. I admired physicists and astronomers like Einstein, Copernicus, and Galileo, and I remember reading children’s science magazines.

YH: What inspired you to go to an art university after spending your elementary to high school years as a science and astronomy enthusiast?

KN: I attended Ibaraki High School, a preparatory school known for its focus on entry into prestigious universities like the University of Tokyo or Kyoto University. Despite enrolling there, I disliked the competitive atmosphere and the societal pressure to pursue careers in large corporations. I was interested in studying physics or engineering at Kyoto University, but my passions gradually expanded to architecture, film, and drawing.

With a constant stream of ideas, the best way to explore my creativity freely was through an art university. I started to learn drawing at a preparatory school called Miyazaki Atelier, where I began mastering my skills in croquis, a technique that bridges the gap between eye and hand in drawing.

Initially, I planned to major in oil painting at Kyoto City University of Arts, but the university has a unique system where you can choose your major six months after enrollment. Everyone took introductory courses in oil painting, Japanese painting, sculpture, design, and crafts in a class called “Comprehensive Basics.”During this time, I found Professor Hitoshi Nomura’s assignments in the sculpture department particularly interesting. The department’s flexibility with materials and expressive media further appealed to me, ultimately leading me to choose sculpture as my major.

YH: What kind of assignment did Professor Nomura give you?

KN: The theme was “light,” and I created an object using a radiator, copper tubing for refrigerants, and parts of a cathode-ray tube that I had picked up. I combined these elements and attached a large lens in front of it, with LED lights flickering in the darkness behind it. This piece mimicked the structure of an eye, a camera, and a television monitor, but it was merely an object without any function to display images. This work eventually led me to use lenses in my later creations.

YH: This sounds fascinating just to hear about it. The teachers you meet when you are young are really important for artists, aren’t they?

KN: Absolutely. Teachers like Noriyasu Fukushima, Hitoshi Nomura, Susumu Koshimizu, Kodai Nakahara, and Shiro Matsui were all part of the sculpture department then. They often referenced phenomenology and ideas lingering from the “Gutai” and “Mono-ha” groups. And each teacher had a distinctive approach as an artist, an attitude of not forcing relationships with commercial galleries, and a dedication to their research and production, which left a strong impression on me.

I’d also like to talk about some works I created during these days. Usually, when making a life-size figure, one models the entire body in water-based clay and casts it in plaster to make a statue, but I disliked that and preferred the raw, freshness of water-based clay which I then created by coating the clay with resin and polishing it to make this thin embrace about a millimeter thick. The life-size figure of a naked boy in Membrane of the Boy and the head of an adult in Window had openings in the membranes around the eyes, allowing the clay to dry slowly over several months, eventually changing its color. In my undergrad, I created a headless sacred beast with a hollow body and a clay figure of a boy sitting in front of it, called The Boy and his Sacred Beast. The entire body of the beast is covered with a hemp fiber called “susa,” which is used to reinforce plaster. This is potentially what led to my series featuring taxidermied animals as motifs.

In graduate school, I created a series of ballpoint pen drawings called B.P.D. I visited a research institute equipped with an electron microscope to photograph thinly sliced sections of animal organs. I was particularly impressed by the images of a mouse’s tear glands, and this inspired me to create the drawings by adding each dot with a ballpoint pen. Drawing with a water-based ballpoint pen on water-resistant paper caused the lines to contract, resulting in detailed drawings resembling etchings. As I continued with the series, I decided to expand the concept of “cell” from these drawings into sculptures, leading to various sculptural works.

In the late ‘90s, there were times marked by epoch-making events like the birth of the cloned sheep, “Dolly” in the U.K. At the same time, computers and the Internet were becoming widespread. I felt that this information revolution could dissolve and evolve the boundaries between technology and expression, or architecture and art, through mutual resonance, and I wanted to capture that in my work.

After returning from studying in London, I connected to the internet for the first time and saw a taxidermied sheep on Yahoo Auctions, reminiscent of Dolly. I bought it for 20,000 yen, and while looking at it in my cramped room, I thought about what sculpture should be like at the dawn of the Internet era. By covering the sheep’s body with transparent, lens-like beads, I aimed to create a “sheep as an image through lenses,” transforming objects rather than merely shaping them into sculptures.

At the end of my graduate studies, I created Animazumo, a sculpture abstracting and enlarging the sacred beast from The Boy and his Sacred Beast with foam-like objects expanding from the beast’s back, made of polyurethane. Just as living beings form by accumulating cells, the foam was formed by aggregating bubbles, connecting to the installation Scum Spectrum, representing an expanding skin.

My doctoral thesis, titled “Aesthetics and Surface Skin – a Methodology in Contemporary Sculpture,” discussed a series of categories that continue to this day, such as PixCell, Scum, and PRISM, based on the concept of “cells.” By the time I graduated from the doctoral program, I had already exhibited my works annually at Gallery Nomart, and the foundation for these categories was established.

YH: What philosophical ideas had the greatest influence on you when writing “Aesthetics and Surface Skin”?

KN: I was influenced by Wolfgang Welsch’s “Ästhetisches Denken” and Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy. During graduate school, I traveled around Europe to research and interview Steiner education teachers to study formative education for young children.