Between
Form &
Void
Dissolving Boundaries, 2024
Mixed media installation, 12 × 8 × 4m
Selected Works
Works
Exhibition History
Exhibitions
2024
Between Form and Void
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
2023
Dissolving Boundaries
The Noguchi Museum, New York
2022
Material Memories
Serpentine Gallery, London
2021
Borrowed Landscapes
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
2020
Threshold States
MoMA PS1, New York
2019
Still Passage
Palazzo Grassi, Venice
“I seek the tension between permanence and dissolution — where material becomes memory.”
Artist Statement
Kai Nakamura (b. 1985, Kyoto) works across sculpture, installation, painting, and digital media. Drawing on the spatial philosophies of traditional Japanese architecture and the raw materiality of post-minimalist practice, Nakamura creates environments that hover between construction and erosion.
Central to the work is the concept of ma — the Japanese understanding of negative space not as absence but as active presence. Each installation invites the viewer to inhabit the interval between objects, to experience the architecture of emptiness.
Biography
Nakamura received an MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts (2010) and completed residencies at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2012) and ISCP, New York (2014). The studio practice operates between Tokyo and New York, maintaining workshops in both cities.
Recent solo exhibitions include Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2024), The Noguchi Museum (New York, 2023), and Serpentine Gallery (London, 2022). Work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
Nakamura is represented by Pace Gallery (New York) and SCAI The Bathhouse (Tokyo).
Selected Press
Press &
Recognition
- ArtForum ‘Kai Nakamura's Spatial Meditations’ 2024
- Frieze ‘Between Form and Void — A New Language of Installation’ 2024
- The New York Times ‘The Sculptor Who Builds With Emptiness’ 2023
- Bijutsu Techo ‘Material Memories: Nakamura's Return to Kyoto’ 2022
- Wallpaper* ‘Ten Artists Redefining Space in 2022’ 2022
- Art in America ‘Threshold States at MoMA PS1’ 2020
Studio, Sumida-ku, Tokyo — 2024
Studio
Tokyo
3-14-7 Narihira, Sumida-ku
Tokyo 130-0002, Japan
New York
47 Great Jones Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10012
studio@kainakamura.com
Commissions & Inquiries