Contemporary art and a new decade of 21st century sculpture
Kohei Nawa
Kohei Nawa turns the idea of the computer-generated 'skin' (design themes for web interfaces, applications and so on) into three-dimensional reality in his ongoing PixCell series.
Born in 1975, the young Japanese artist is best-known for his Bead works in which random objects - toys, plastic fruit, taxidermied animals - are encased in transparent shells of variously sized, spherical 'cells'.
The resulting "husk of light" partially masks the object, yet refracts and magnifies it too, with each orb providing an infinity of potential viewpoints (left and below).
The joint emphasis on visual production and quasi-organic process implied by Nawa's 'PixCell' neologism extends to other methods of producing skin-like sheaths.
His Scum series uses a polyurethane resin spray to coat objects in a chemically self-generating flaky white residue; the works comprising Liquid (below) suggest scientific environments for the cultivation of Bead cells themselves.
Milk-white fluids, eerily illuminated from within, gloop like over-sized lava lamps as silicone oil bubbles rise upwards: units for the production of modified surfaces, yet with an inner life of their own (below).
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