Kohei Nawa Brings “Photon Camp” to Los Angeles in a Long-Awaited Solo Debut
A taxidermied elk covered in transparent spheres now anchors Kohei Nawa’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. “Photon Camp,” on view at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles, gathers works from the Japanese artist’s “PixCell” and “Prism” series into an installation that treats the gallery less as a container than as part of the work itself.
Kohei Nawa (b. 1975) first developed “PixCell” in 2001 with botanical motifs before expanding the series to animals and found objects. In 2002, he made the first “PixCell” sculptures that encase taxidermied animals beneath thousands of clear spheres, producing objects that feel at once seductively polished and faintly disquieting. The centerpiece of the Los Angeles show, “Elk 3,” continues that logic with a taxidermied elk wrapped in transparent orbs.
The exhibition also includes “Prism” works, a more recent body of sculpture in which Nawa has begun using motifs that change over time, including fresh flowers and candles. Together, the two series extend his long-running interest in perception, especially the way images are altered by technology and by the act of looking itself.
Nawa has described the show as an attempt to blur the line between artwork and environment. He said he wanted the space and the sculptures to resonate with one another, while also considering the idea of “drifting objects” in America and the historical and cultural background of Los Angeles. That layered approach is central to his practice, which draws from Surrealism, digital imaging, and Japanese ideas of flotsam and meaning-making.
The artist’s studio, Sandwich, adds another dimension to that outlook. Based in a former Kyoto sandwich factory, it functions as a collaborative laboratory for artists, architects, dancers, and designers. Nawa has called it a “living organism” that evolves with the people inside it.
For Los Angeles audiences, “Photon Camp” offers a concentrated view of an artist whose work has always been about more than surface. It asks how sculpture can register the instability of images, and how an exhibition can become a field of shifting perception rather than a sequence of objects.
