Kohei Nawa

Kohei Nawa was born in 1975 in Osaka, Japan, and lives and works in Kyoto. He earned a BA in fine art sculpture from Kyoto City University of Arts in 1998, spent 1999 on a sculpture exchange at the Royal College of Art in London, and returned to Kyoto City University of Arts to complete a PhD in fine art sculpture in 2003. He is a professor at Kyoto University of the Arts and directs SANDWICH, a Kyoto-based creative platform working across contemporary art, design, and architecture.

Nawa began the PixCell series in 2002, encasing taxidermied deer and other objects under thousands of transparent glass or acrylic spheres. The name fuses "pixel," the smallest unit of a digital image, with "cell," the smallest unit of living matter, and the series became his signature examination of how physical and virtual perception intersect. He has extended this inquiry through the Prism series and through large collaborative and site-specific projects, most notably Throne, a monumental installation shown at the Louvre Pyramid in Paris as part of the Japonismes 2018 cultural season. His work has been included in museum surveys such as SYNTHESIS at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2011) and group presentations including the Mori Art Museum's Roppongi Crossing (2007) and the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane (2009).

Nawa's practice is most often discussed in terms of its exploration of the boundary between the physical and the virtual, and between the natural and the synthetic. Artnet News covered his 2026 Los Angeles solo debut, Photon Camp, at Pace Gallery, describing his PixCell sculptures' long-running inquiry into how the virtual world reshapes visual perception. His inclusion in major group surveys such as Roppongi Crossing at the Mori Art Museum and the Asia Pacific Triennial, alongside a solo presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, has reinforced a critical consensus that treats him as a leading figure in Japanese sculpture of his generation, one whose ideas translate as readily to a museum survey as to a large-scale public commission.

Nawa's auction market centers on Hong Kong sales of his best known PixCell-Deer sculptures. Secondary-market aggregators report a high of about USD 1.05 million for a Nawa sculpture, though the specific work, auction house, and sale date behind that figure are not independently confirmed in the sources available. A documented result for PixCell-Deer #10 shows a sale of HKD 4,064,000 at Phillips, illustrating how much individual results can vary by work within the same series. His primary market runs through Pace Gallery, SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, and Arario Gallery, all of which have mounted repeated solo exhibitions of his work over the past decade.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Kohei Nawa, so provenance and studio or gallery verification carry extra weight, particularly for PixCell works, which exist in numbered editions within a series rather than as unique objects. His auction record is thin relative to his institutional profile, with the small number of tracked sales concentrated in Hong Kong and prices that vary considerably by individual work. Collectors should weigh his strong museum presence, including a piece in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, against the limited depth of his public sales history when assessing any single result.