Between Pixel and Photon: Kohei Nawa's First Solo Exhibition in Los Angeles
- Apr 3
- 3 min read
Photon Camp, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles | April 11 – June 6, 2026
At Pace Gallery's Los Angeles space on South La Brea Avenue, a taxidermized elk stands mid-step, its entire surface covered in glass spheres ranging from marbles to baseballs. It gazes past the viewer, into empty space. This work, PixCell-Elk#3 (2026), is the centerpiece of Photon Camp — Kohei Nawa's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, bringing together 20 new works from his PixCell and Prism series in an environment that engages directly with the architecture of the gallery's main exhibition space.
Nawa was born in Osaka in 1975 and has worked in Kyoto for most of his career, where he completed his BFA, MFA, and PhD in sculpture at Kyoto City University of Arts. He runs Sandwich Inc., a creative platform spanning art, design, and architecture, and holds a professorship at Kyoto University of the Arts. His work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Mori Art Museum, and the Leeum Museum of Art, among others. In 2018, he suspended a 10.4-meter sculpture inside the glass pyramid of the Musée du Louvre as part of the cultural festival Japonismes 2018. This Los Angeles exhibition is his first independent presentation at Pace Gallery on the American West Coast.
PixCell: Covering and Refracting
The PixCell series, which Nawa began in 2002, is the work for which he is best known. The name fuses "pixel" — the basic unit of a digital image — with "cell," the basic unit of biological life. He covers the surfaces of taxidermized animals and found objects with transparent glass spheres, obscuring the original texture and detail beneath, so that viewers can only perceive the object through countless refracting surfaces. It is not decoration. It is a question about how information is preserved: when an object is completely covered, does it remain itself?
In Photon Camp, PixCell-Elk#3 serves as the spatial anchor of the entire presentation. Other works surround it — some on pedestals, others on the floor or mounted on walls — unfolding through the room along the elk's line of sight. The installation does not ask to be read from a fixed point. It accumulates.
Deer have appeared repeatedly in Nawa's practice for reasons he has been deliberate about. In Japan, deer are revered as messengers of the gods in Shinto tradition, yet simultaneously managed as pests in rural areas. That contradiction — sacred and mundane, natural and administered — is precisely the tension his work inhabits.
Prism: When Edges Dissolve
The Prism series approaches the same questions through a different material logic. Nawa applies prism sheets to the surfaces of transparent display cases, causing the objects inside to shift in appearance depending on the viewer's position — edges dissolve, forms drift, the contents become something close to hallucination. He has placed this series in dialogue with the current condition of images: a moment when AI-generated visuals cause meaning to emerge probabilistically from noise, and when the boundary between the real and the fictional is no longer stable. The Prism works predate this moment by two decades, but find in it an unexpected relevance.
The Weight Behind the Title
The title Photon Camp carries a dimension that is easy to miss. Nawa has spoken openly about how the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake shaped his worldview and his practice. For him, a photon — the smallest unit of light and energy transfer — offers a way of thinking about what an artwork actually is: not a fixed object, but a phenomenological event, a momentary convergence of light and matter that could just as easily come apart.
That understanding gives the glass spheres and the prism sheets a weight beyond perceptual experiment. What covers an object also preserves it, and transforms it. The two gestures are the same.
Exhibition Details
Kohei Nawa: Photon Camp Pace Gallery,
Los Angeles 1201 South La Brea Avenue,
Los Angeles
April 11 – June 6, 2026
Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 – 18:00
