Kohei Nawa / Japan b.1975 / PixCell-Double Deer#4 2010 / Mixed media / 224 x 200 x 160cm / Purchased 2010 with funds from the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Kohei Nawa

Kohei Nawa
PixCell-Double Deer#4 2010

Not Currently on Display

Kohei Nawa’s sculpture helps us question the differences between seeing something on the internet and experiencing it in real life. To create this artwork, Nawa first searched for images on the internet of taxidermied deer that he could buy. He then purchased two deer in identical poses, and fused them together.

Forming one sculpture, the two deer have the same coating of transparent beads, which distort our view of the animals underneath. The glass and plastic beads refer to the pixels of the deer image when viewed on a computer screen.

Kohei Nawa was born in Osaka and now lives and works in Kyoto, where he is Associate Professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design. As a sculptor, Nawa is interested in forms and surfaces and how they interact to become objects. He is fascinated by how we navigate and understand objects in the virtual world via the internet.

To create his artworks, he enters keywords into online search engines and conceives of sculptures based on the images that are returned. He then sources taxidermied animals from online auction sites and covers them with glass and resin beads of varying sizes.

Discussion Questions

What does Nawa’s artwork tell us about the ways real life is represented on the online world?

Activities

1. Find an image of an animal or person from a magazine or on the internet. Cut the bubbles out of range of bubble wrap plastics and collage these over the top of your image. Take a close-up photo of your collage and compare this to the original image. What do you notice?

2. Using grid paper or other type of grid, create a pixelated version of the same image used in the activity above. Compare your collage with the pixelated image.