ART-PRESENTATION: Kohei Nawa-Trans-figure
Kohei Nawa is at the forefront of a new generation of Japanese creative minds, grouped in an old sandwich factory located outside Kyoto, named SANDWICH, whose aim is to overstep popular labels of manga and anime in order to offer a less obvious view of Japanese contemporary art and culture. Buddhism and Shintoism intertwine in his work, but it would be reductive to limit his references to these two philosophical doctrines. The work of Kohei Nawa is something more complex. The whole universe with its cells and cellular structures becomes vehicle of the artist’s expression.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
Moving fluidly between different media, Nawa’s work explores themes of science and digital culture while challenging viewers’ sensory experiences. Interested in industrial mass-production, Nawa often works with synthetic compounds, using them to consider the ideas of the real and the virtual, and perception versus illusion. In Kohei Nawa’s solo exhibition “Trans-figure” are on presentation works from his ongoing series “Direction”, “Ether”, “PixCell” and “Villus”, that his powerful meditations on sensation and materiality. A highlight of the exhibition is a “PixCell” sculpture of a taxidermied maral deer. “PixCell” is a term coined by connecting the words pixel, the smallest portion of a digital image, with cells. Images of chosen objects are digitalized and encapsulated in a layer of spheres; the same process is then applied to the physical piece by covering it with a layer of glass beads. While the glass beads create a different system of representation through matter, the various dimensions of the spheres create the effect of a lens and a unique, deep, and continuous view.
The work resonates with a type of religious painting known as a Kasuga Deer Mandala, which features a deer (the messenger animal of Shinto deities)posed similarly with its head turned to the side, and with a round sacred mirror on its back. In Japanese art, the deer is often depicted as a companion of ancient sages and has auspicious and poetic. For his work the artist says “The approach of making sculpture from granular materials eventually emerged when I was searching for my own means of expression, and is associated with the concept that the whole world is made from cells and cellular structures. At the molecular level, all natural and man-made articles are groups of particles. Also, if you look at animal cells, they are full of DNA and other forms of information. I work from the concept that the cell itself represents information, and also gives the material its shape”. Similarly, the works in the “Villus” series include a variety of objects upon which the artist applies a Polyurethane foam, creating a mist that masks the irregularities of the surface and dulls the contours and textures. In his “Direction” paintings, Nawa pours black paint onto a vertically set canvas. He offsets the grain of the canvas on the stretcher by fifteen degrees, and then allows the paint to slowly drip down the face of the canvas, allowing the force of gravity to produce the lines of the painting. Works from the “Ether” series, which can be presented outdoors as well as indoors, translate highly viscous liquids into a solid state at the moment they drip downward. Appearing as a three-dimensional sculpture, the iterative forms of the droplets appear as an endless column and visualize the force of gravity.
John Akomfrah digs into history’s darkness at the New Museum
3 August 2018
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In the unnerving, carnivalesque 2015 Venice Biennale, an exhibition full of terrific violence, some artists contributed disproportionately to the widespread sense of fear. In one gallery, a man in a film by Christian Boltanski sat on a dirty floor with a hood over his head, vomiting blood and convulsing. Nearby, Adrian Piper scrawled her explicit threat onto an imposing black chalkboard: “Everything will be taken away.”
A short walk away was the world premiere of the British artist John Akomfrah’s film essay Vertigo Sea (2015), a 48min dirge, mostly collaged from found footage and projected onto three separate screens, lamenting the horrific costs of conquest. It is a damning picture of humanity: in long sections of the film, polar bears are hunted and broken. Whales are cut apart by men with enormous knives. Slaves are thrown off ships by traders looking to make insurance claims. In some of the most harrowing documentary shots, fishermen destroy an animal that pitifully spits blood back into the water.
Vertigo Sea is now at the centre of Akomfrah’s first US museum survey at the New Museum, Signs of Empire (2 September), a show that further encourages the impression that he is one of the most forceful and stirring artists of the day—and one of our best social archaeologists. To make his great works, he digs through the past and almost always finds something we have not seen before, at least not properly. In his hands, the historical record reflects a brutal reality. But not only that: it also comes into our experiences like a mirage, as a panoply of pictures, sounds, and vague memories that can be re-edited into new stories with perhaps new futures.
Or, as the Jamaican-born, English-trained theorist Stuart Hall once put it: “Another history is always possible.” Hall, who was born in 1932 and died in 2014, is the subject of The Unfinished Conversation (2012), one of Akomfrah’s most confident works. Across three screens, we get snapshots from the philosopher’s life and times: newsreels of student marches, British slums and bombs falling from the sky, a jazz band beating away, a once-proud seaport, battles in the streets, a lone figure in a tundra, a black woman crying.
As these shots bounce around, here’s Hall in his 20s, breathlessly explaining how he edits the New Left Review and why Britain should disarm its nuclear weapons and make itself an example to the world. Later, he fervently lists the many inexcusable violences of empire, and suddenly on another screen, here is Anthony Eden, the former British Prime Minister, justifying on a news programme the country’s disastrous and frivolous invasion of Egypt in 1956 to further the Suez Crisis.
The record is here, plain for all to see. But Akomfrah never spells anything out in his art films. Much of the pleasure and surprise of his work comes from how he complicates chronology. Instead of neat summaries, we get bursts and excerpts, echoes from the past, glimpses of fear and trembling next to radical potential, and then your memories re-cut everything into your own edited sense of history and possibility. These are the building blocks of Akomfrah’s work.
But what if things had been different? This question haunts the exhibition. In Transfigured Night (2013), a two-channel meditation on transatlantic republics, we see Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the first president of the Ivory Coast, make a state visit to John F. Kennedy in Washington, DC. At one point, the two take a trip to the Lincoln Memorial, and briefly, in a flicker, here is a young, liberal American president with his counterpart from a newly independent African republic, together at the feet of the greatest and most radical political leader we have ever known. As the picture dissolves, it leaves an afterimage of faded potential.
Transfigured Night is one of Akomfrah’s weaker films, ostensibly for reasons of shape and colour: sometimes, the palettes across the two screens just clash. This happens mostly when documentary footage appears alongside shots Akomfrah took more recently himself. It is impossible to dampen the blinding glare of contemporary pictures, especially alongside the muted tones of archival reels. Inevitably, another question comes up: how can anything Akomfrah devises be as raw or powerful as the images he finds? At several points in Vertigo Sea, characters appear dressed in 18th-century garb and it can feel somehow inadequate to the problem at hand.
Akomfrah was born in 1957 in Accra, Ghana, but moved with his family to London when he was four years old. In 1982, he was part of a group of seven that founded the Black Audio Film Collective as a collaborative practice in the UK. In 1988, Coco Fusco curated an exhibition at the Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York that prominently featured their work. Before they disbanded in 1998, they created films like Seven Songs for Malcolm X, a multi-layered study released in 1993, the same year as Spike Lee’s theatrical biopic (the director is interviewed in the collective’s film). Meanwhile, Akomfrah continued to produce more conventional documentary films, including studies on the Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr (1997) and the jazz composer Louis Armstrong (1999), both for the BBC.
In the New Museum’s excellent exhibition catalogue, Diana Nawi notes that unlike Transfigured Night, the Martin Luther King film “ends on a hopeful and even triumphant note”. Yet even in Akomfrah’s darkest work, there is always a clear sense of purpose. The earliest piece in the show, Expeditions One: Signs of Empire, made by the Black Audio Film Collective in 1983, begins with an ominous title sequence with a silhouette of Justice, sword in one hand, but her scale nowhere to be seen. The next picture warns that what follows is “an investigation into colonial fantasy”.
Dissonant music builds throughout, and studiously, over 26 minutes, we dive into the twisted horrors of European conquest. The pictures and sounds are alarming, but they also offer a novel way into the past. Akomfrah is not simply re-telling a story; he has a grander ambition than that. He’s chasing Walter Benjamin’s dream: not only to truly, honestly see history, but “to take control of a memory as it flashes in a moment of danger”.
• John Akomfrah: Signs of Empire, New Museum, New York (until 2 September)
Snapshots to Art to Your Walls!
Whenever a customer brings up the subject of what sort of art they should buy, we always tell them the same thing: Buy the art you love. Regardless of its cost, age, provenance or who the artist is, art is meant to speak to us and touch us in some way. With that in mind, it’s a safe bet that pictures of our beloved pets, just like the rest of our family, will always touch our hearts and make us smile. That’s why we always love it when a customer brings us their pet’s pictures.
Another type of art that makes us smile, and feel pride, is artwork we have created ourselves. This runs the gamut from a kindergartner’s doodle to the work of an accomplished artist. But maybe you think you have no artistic ability. Think again.
You probably have a really nice camera in that phone sitting beside you or in your pocket. And you probably have about half a zillion pictures on it. Did you know that just about any of those photos can become a nice piece of art? There are dozens of apps available, many for free or just a couple dollars, that can help you transform a casual snapshot into something you’d be proud to frame (We’ll help with that!) and hang on your wall.
Here’s a great example we recently framed for our customer. She took this candid picture of her inquisitive little boy as he came over to see what she was doing. It captured his silly personality so well she knew she wanted to do something special with it. She used Prisma, one of the many apps mentioned, to transform him in a couple clicks and then had him printed. The filter she used was just one of many possibilities available; the photo could have just as easily been transformed into a watercolor, black and white photo, sketch, or who knows what else.
In selecting the framing, we considered a few different colors for mats but decided that a black mat was best. It provides a lot of contrast that allows the colors to stand out well and it draws the eye in to his adorable face. The photo is tightly cropped, without a lot extra space around him. In a case like this it is normally tempting to use a lighter mat on the bottom to “open up” the picture, but we decided to keep the tight cropping and the “in your face” nature of this little guy.
Our customer was thrilled to have her favorite little boy on the wall ready to say hello to her every time she passes by, and we were happy to help put a smile on her face. Browse through some of your favorite pictures and we’re sure you’ll find at least a few you’d love to have on your walls. We’re here and ready to help you get them there!
