Kohei Nawa: Photon Camp / Pace Gallery, Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
Kohei Nawa
Photon Camp
Pace Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
April 11 - June 6, 2026
Drawing out the unique properties of various traditional and unconventional materials in his paintings, sculptures, and installations, Nawa explores nuanced relationships between physical and virtual spaces, synthetic and natural forces, and the individual and the collective. Intrinsic to his practice is a rigorous engagement with technologies that traverse eras and cultures, particularly information technologies. Visual distortions and transformations cut across his artworks, encouraging viewers to consider the ways that digital technologies impact their relationship to and experience of the physical world.
Titled Photon Camp, the artist’s exhibition at Pace Los Angeles foregrounds his expansive investigations of perceptual and sensory phenomena and reflects new directions in his recent work. For Nawa, an artwork is not a static entity fixed by a single interpretation. Rather, it is a phenomenological event that occurs when swarms of photons momentarily and miraculously come together. His first installation comprising both his PixCell and Prism series—which he has developed continuously over the course of his career—explores tensions between the natural and the artificial, the real and the fictional, and the sacred and the profane.
The artist’s new PixCell and Prism works reflect his enduring engagement with the history of Surrealism. Incorporating taxidermized animals and found objects he has collected from different places and during various periods of his life, these sculptures juxtapose new technologies and modes of making with analogue materials. In his celebrated PixCell works, which he began producing 25 years ago, Nawa covers the surfaces of objects with transparent spheres, or cells, to distort viewers’ perceptions of the forms beneath. With his Prism works, he houses objects inside transparent boxes, which fragment and transform the appearance of their contents depending on the viewer’s position. Works in both series pose questions about the nature of reality through visuo-tactile experience.
