Kohei Nawa's deer in identical poses produce an optical doubling

Wed 13 Aug 2025

Kohei Nawa is fascinated by how we use our sense of sight and touch to gather information from our environment, his works fuse the natural and virtual realms through exquisite studies in form and perception.

In PixCell-Double Deer#4 2010, two deer in identical poses have been sliced together to produce an optical doubling, which the artist likens to the effect produced when holding ‘Ctrl+C’ on a keyboard. The outer surface of transparent beads approximates the thousands of pixels that make up digital images, as Nawa attempts to recreate the visual experience of the computer screen in sculptural form.

Coining the term ‘PixCell’ — a combination of ‘pixel’ (the smallest element of a digital image) and ‘cell’ (microscopic organic molecules) — Nawa meshes a virtual aesthetic with tangible forms. The silhouettes of the deer become unstable and dynamic as the viewer moves around the sculpture, and this elasticity of perception suggest a disjunction between visual perception and bodily experience in the internet age.

Watch | Kohei Nawa discusses his ‘PixCell' sculptures

Nawa is fascinated with surfaces, and is drawn to how we identify with our surroundings through our physical senses — everything around us is a series of light-reflecting surfaces and everything we perceive by touch is covered by some kind of skin. His eye-catching ‘beads’ sculptures such as PixCell-Double Deer#4 transform objects through the addition of layers of transparent glass or resin beads, frustrating our desire to see or touch the objects.

By using beads, Nawa attempts to recreate the properties of his virtual creation in physical form, recapturing something of the ‘original’, pixelated computer image. In PixCell-Double Deer#4 two taxidermied deer, sourced online, have been fused together, the identical poses of the deer, enabled by the increasing use by taxidermists of standard moulds, disturbs our understanding of the animal as unique; when given the same exterior coating of beads, they become uniform. The skin of beads fractures, magnifies and distorts the animal forms, transforming them into particles of deconstructed light and dramatically altering our perception.

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia