An effervescing elk is the central work in Kohei Nawa’s upcoming exhibition at Pace Gallery Los Angeles. It pauses, mid-step, alert to something on its right, but it’s otherwise inscrutable, lost in a cloud of bubbles – glass spheres ranging in size from marbles to baseballs – that cover it hoof to horn. 

Works like this one, PixCell-Elk#3 (2026), are beautiful and uncanny, self-evident and mystifying. They’re a window into an expansive practice that includes gravity paintings, motion photography, fluid installations, and otherworldly scenography. 

Born in Osaka in 1975, Nawa grew up believing anything could be used to make art. His father was an elementary school teacher who ran workshops teaching kids how to make toys by hand. He could, for instance, split a piece of bamboo and quickly shape it with a knife to make a taketombo – a small bamboo-copter. ‘When it flew high into the sky, it truly felt like magic,’ Nawa says. 

As a child, Nawa was especially intrigued by lenses, which he describes as ‘an old technology that continues to feel new.’ He would observe the night sky through a telescope and take photos with his dad’s camera and develop them at home. ‘From that mysterious image of the lens, my curiosity naturally expanded toward the universe, life, and technology,’ he says.

Nawa contemplated studying oil painting and architecture at university, but decided on sculpture after meeting Hitoshi Nomura, a professor in the sculpture department of Kyoto City University of Arts who shared his omnivorous curiosity. ‘He would expand celestial photographs that he took himself into sculpture and even music – approaching the relationships between the universe, time, and life through a remarkably diverse set of methods,’ he explains. ‘I was struck by the realization that sculpture could connect with – and unfold into – so many different things.’

Nomura helped him think of sculpture as a way to express the relationship between the world and human beings, irrespective of medium. Nawa’s ‘Direction’ paintings (2012–2024), for instance, are created by drizzling ink with a precisely formulated viscosity down canvases rotated by 15 degrees from the usual vertical orientation. The resulting stripes – proof of gravity’s remarkably steady brush – resemble the strong, high-contrast lines of the ‘Moment Photography’ series (2021–2022), which was created through an entirely different process, with the shots taken from speeding Shinkansen trains as Nawa traveled between Kyoto and Tokyo during the pandemic.

Finding ways to represent biological cells, the building blocks of life, is a recurrent theme in Nawa’s work. As a student he drew them one by one with a ballpoint pen for a series called ‘B.P.D.’. He later suggested them with bubbles, using detergent in the series ‘Foam’ (2013–2019), and then polyurethane foam – which quickly expands in volume, like cells dividing – for the series ‘Scum’ (2000–2011). Especially seductive is the 2018 installation from the ‘Biomatrix’ series (2018–2023), in which caramel-colored silicone oil slowly, almost stickily, releases bubbles of air, leaving behind a grid of ‘cells’ that resemble cinnamon swirls.  

Spark (2023), on the other hand, seems extraterrestrial. These sculptures, made up of countless carbon fiber rods, each like the leg of a camera tripod, explode in all directions. Flocked in velvet, they simultaneously implode, swallowing light like a black hole. 

‘The “cell,” which forms the foundation of my practice, is fluid,’ Nawa explains – ‘it moves between information and matter, and it exists across scales, from micro to macro.’ He says the Spark can also be understood as ‘a fraying produced in reality by the repeated cycle of life energy and death drive in the cells that fill the world – and it suggests the constant stirring of cells that continue to transform.’ 

Nawa was working toward his PhD when he created PixCell-Cabbage (2002), the very first work in his best-known ongoing series, ‘PixCell’. Made for his solo exhibition ‘CELL’ at Nomart, Osaka, in 2002, the titular vegetable was imprisoned in bubble-like glass beads, or ‘pixel-cells’, that at once represent and constitute the work.

At the time, digital cameras were becoming widely available and scientists were making big strides in biotechnology; a cat was cloned for the first time in 2002, and by 2003 the Human Genome Project had mapped out 92% of the human genome.

‘In response to this techno-social moment, “PixCell” became an attempt – through the perspective of sculpture – to propose a new format for preserving information, in a surreal, non-rational way,’ he says.

In describing his phenomenally successful, ‘PixCell’ works, Nawa has invoked the Shinto concept of yorishiro, wherein spirits must inhabit a physical object in order to communicate their wishes. Artists likewise seek physical or visual forms in which to concentrate ineffable thoughts and feelings.

The series became a whole new way for Nawa to see the world – he compares it to inventing a camera and being compelled to photograph everything. He has since made a ‘PixCell’ toy machine gun, a ‘PixCell’ statue of the Virgin Mary, and a ‘PixCell’ bottle of Tabasco sauce, among many other things. But the most resonant are the deer; the first time I saw one, on entering a booth at an art fair in Shanghai, I felt strangely lucky to happen upon it.

Nawa attributes the success of these works to people’s deep historical, cultural, social, and environmental relationships with deer around the world. They’re on the walls of Paleolithic French caves and in the digital forests of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017).

‘In Japan, deer are revered as messengers of the gods, yet they are also treated as pests,’ Nawa adds. ‘That contradiction symbolically reveals the strange and delicate relationship forged between humans and nature.’

In the related series, ‘Prism’ (2003–), Nawa applies prism sheets to transparent boxes, mediating our view of the objects (ordered from the internet) inside, which become ghostly, like hallucinations. While this series dates back to the early 2000s, Nawa says, ‘these works resonate with our present condition, where image-generating AI causes meaning to emerge probabilistically from noise distributions, and where the boundary between reality and fiction is dissolving.’

AI is also the subject of Throne (2018), a dizzyingly ornate 10.4-meter-tall sculpture that Nawa suspended in the glass pyramid of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, as part of the festival ‘Japonismes 2018: les âmes en résonance’ held in Paris and elsewhere in France. The throne sits empty with just enough room to accommodate a young child, suggesting the ascent of a new intelligence that’s still in its infancy.

More than two decades after the first PixCell works, Nawa continues to take inspiration from developing technologies, but he says he’s more interested in the ‘new forms and interfaces that emerge where technology and sensibility press against each other.’

His endeavors continue to expand – like polyurethane foam – with architecture projects in Tokyo and Kyoto and work for his creative agency Sandwich Inc., as well as scenography, installations, and sculpture.

‘I believe,’ Nawa says, ‘that as feedback loops circulate properly across these different modes of expression, my overall activity – centered on sculpture – can continue to move forward.’