VENUES

SCAI The Bathhouse is a contemporary art gallery located in Yanaka, which has a town-like ambience reminiscent of Old Tokyo. In walking proximity to Ueno, an area dense with museums and art colleges, the gallery is housed in a venerable public bath imbued with a 200-year history. Take one step inside and you find a white cube and mortar floor with soft natural light descending from the high ceiling. Treasuring the past while updating the space for the future, SCAI has become known by both local and international visitors as a center for the latest contemporary art.

Since its establishment in 1993, SCAI The Bathhouse has realized numerous exhibitions, commissioned projects, and public works. The gallery seeks to function as a meeting point for various currents in contemporary art, both in Japan and abroad, and to play a leading and responsible role in the art scene.

For "Tornscape," Kohei Nawa has created a video installation in which fluids of different propensities wriggle and collide in a virtual landscape—their forms changing constantly from unique algorithms—that will consume the full expanse of the gallery. Manipulating parameters in the digital simulation of climate conditions such as wind strength, particle mass, and friction coefficient, the work depicts the ephemerality of the unsettling world we live in, referencing a historic Japanese essay written over 800 years ago during a period known for a series of disasters and plagues.

Nawa’s fifth exhibition with the gallery—and the first since 2018—showcases this immersive installation of vision and sound that occupies the white cube along with a selection of the artist’s latest works, including "Dune," a series of two-dimensional pieces in which Nawa describes the relationship between the climate and landscape using physical properties of paint materials.