Do we really “see” what is right in front of us?

Colors emerging through light. Images that disappear as we move closer. Landscapes lingering in memory, and creatures that do not yet exist in this world. Things that are there but remain unseen, and things that do not exist yet can somehow be seen. The boundary between them may be far more ambiguous than we imagine.

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At POLA MUSEUM ANNEX in Ginza, Tokyo, contemporary artist Asami Kiyokawa and sculptor Kohei Nawa are presenting Invisible Garden, their first exhibition together. On view from September 16 through November 8, 2026, the exhibition was conceived around the publication of Kiyokawa’s new book, Mienai Niwa - Invisible Garden.

Kiyokawa has expanded her practice from her distinctive use of embroidery on photographs, fabric, and books, exploring the idea of “visualizing the invisible.” Nawa, meanwhile, has focused on the “skin” of sculpture, developing his practice around the concept of the “cell”—both the biological cell and the particle as a fundamental unit—to create new perceptual experiences between material and body.

The two artists have approached the visible and invisible from very different directions. Here, for the first time, those perspectives converge within a single work.

Two Different Artists, Creating One Work for the First Time

Kiyokawa and Nawa are artists, but they are also family.

At the press preview, Nawa recalled that he had initially thought of Kiyokawa as “a completely different type” of artist from himself. He had studied sculpture and engaged deeply with its history, while he associated Kiyokawa’s emergence as an artist with the world of fashion.

Yet as they built a life together and raised two children, they continued to exchange critical observations as creators—whether discussing a film, an artwork, or something encountered in everyday life: “That was good,” or “What do you think about this?”

Kiyokawa also explained that, after around a decade of marriage, she felt that perhaps now they could finally create something together.

It was not simply a matter of collaborating because they are married. Rather, the years each had spent pursuing a distinct creative practice allowed them, eventually, to arrive at a point where those practices could intersect.

The most expansive result is the new PixCell-Our New World, stretching approximately nine meters across the main wall of the gallery. The mixed-media work measures approximately 1,310 × 9,010 × 78 mm.

A “Contemporary Myth” Across Nine Meters

At the foundation of PixCell-Our New World lies the world of Kiyokawa’s long-running Our New World series.

Raised on Awaji Island in western Japan, Kiyokawa describes how living in close proximity to nature cultivated her sensitivity to invisible phenomena—the presence of something unseen, the passage of time, and the sensation of life itself. What began with photography and embroidery has since expanded into painting, installation, and moving image. Her recent practice has increasingly engaged with memory, mythology, nature, and imagination in the age of artificial intelligence.

Reality and unreality coexist within this monumental new work.

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There are photographs Kiyokawa has taken around the world, scenes encountered in everyday life, and images of the forests of Hakone that stayed with her after visiting the Pola Museum of Art. Into these landscapes enter creatures generated with AI—beings that do not exist in the physical world.

What Kiyokawa sought to create, she says, was “a world like a contemporary mythology.”

Just as we now look back at the myths of ancient civilizations, perhaps the age in which we are living will one day appear mythological when viewed from the future. Real landscapes and generated life, nature and artifice, memories of the past and technologies of the present all coexist within a single image, allowing the informational chaos of our time to emerge as a landscape in its own right.

Within it lies another question, which Kiyokawa evokes through the image of Noah’s Ark.

In an age when AI can generate things that have never existed before, what will we choose—and what will we leave for the future?

“It’s chaotic. It’s in a state of confusion, but it’s beautiful,” Kiyokawa said.

Nawa then transforms that world into another mode of perception.

Seeing Kiyokawa’s World Through Nawa’s Lens

The surface of PixCell-Our New World is covered with countless transparent spheres of varying sizes. They belong to Nawa’s signature PixCell language.

Each transparent sphere functions like a lens, magnifying, distorting, and fragmenting the image beneath it. From a distance, the work appears as a vast landscape. Move closer, however, and photographs, colors, and minute textures emerge as separate images within the spheres. Through PixCell, the image constructed by Kiyokawa is repeatedly fragmented and reconfigured as it passes through countless spheres, or “cells.”

Nawa says that working on the piece made him newly aware of just how much minute visual information exists within Kiyokawa’s imagery. At the press preview, he went on to relate the work to Impressionism.

Just as the Impressionists sought to bring the changing effects of light into painting, here the transparent spheres themselves receive, reflect, and refract light. Rather than depicting light, the work allows actual light to continue changing across its surface.

Painting and sculpture. Image and material. The depicted world and the physical reality occupied by the viewer. These boundaries, too, become ambiguous within the transparent cells.

Speaking about the work, Nawa explained:

“Rather than a garden to be understood logically by recognizing symbols and signs, I hope it becomes a garden that you perceive, feel, and receive through your senses.”

PixCell-Our New World is therefore not simply a painting to be decoded by asking what is depicted. A different “garden” emerges according to the viewer’s body and distance from the work, as well as the light and the passage of time.

What Is Visible—and Invisible—Changes with the Viewer

As the exhibition unfolds, the word “Invisible” becomes increasingly physical.

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In Nawa’s PixCell-Random series, colors appear within the transparent cells when viewed from a certain distance. Move closer, and those colors disappear from sight. Shift sideways, and another view emerges.

According to Nawa, he spent approximately two years developing prototypes to translate into an artwork the optical effect by which color appears and disappears according to focal distance.

The work itself has not changed. What has changed is the position of the viewer.

Kiyokawa’s Serendipity series, meanwhile, contains a multitude of motifs: the moon, flora and fauna, and things that do not exist in reality. Details that escape notice at first suddenly reveal themselves as the eye continues to travel across the image. Kiyokawa herself describes the experience as being somewhat like a hidden-picture puzzle.

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Her I : I series takes as its starting point the square image format that became ubiquitous with the rise of social media. Threads are embedded within acrylic, creating a visual effect in which the image appears to shift as the viewer changes position.

Are we seeing what is actually there? Are we seeing what we want to see? Or is something present that we have simply not yet noticed?

Walking through Invisible Garden, the question that lingers is not only what we see, but what it means to see at all.

An “Invisible Garden” Appears Within Kazuyo Sejima’s “Forest”

This garden does not end on the third floor at POLA MUSEUM ANNEX. Descend to POLA GINZA on the first floor, and another garden awaits.

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In December 2025, POLA GINZA reopened as the brand’s global flagship. The spatial design was conceived by architect Kazuyo Sejima. On the first floor, she created a space she described as a “Flora Forest where you can encounter a new self.”

Architecture is only one element. Sound by Keiichiro Shibuya, light by Shozo Toyohisa, and scent by Kan Izumi overlap within the space, creating an environment designed to gently open the senses beyond sight alone.

Now Kiyokawa and Nawa’s Invisible Garden enters that “Flora Forest.”

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On the first floor, an installation brings together new work originating from Kiyokawa’s Dream Time series—in which she has embroidered artificial flowers—with elements of Nawa’s Ether and other sculptural expressions. Also on view is PixCell B.A, the first collaboration between the two artists and B.A, POLA’s prestige skincare brand. POLA MUSEUM ANNEX and POLA GINZA are thus connected through the shared world of Invisible Garden.

A “forest” created through Sejima’s architecture.

A “garden” constructed through Kiyokawa’s images.

A perceptual “garden” formed by Nawa through light and matter.

Three landscapes, each created through a different language, overlap within a single building in Ginza.

Perhaps a Garden Is Not a Place to See, but a Place to Feel

Kiyokawa has sought to make the invisible visible: presence, time, memory, life, mythology—and now a world in which information and AI are increasingly blurring the boundary between reality and the virtual.

Nawa has challenged the very act of seeing through the materiality of the objects before us. A layer of transparent cells can magnify and fragment what seemed familiar, cover it in light, and transform it into something else.

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What emerged when the two artists created a work together for the first time was not simply the sum of their respective practices.

By seeing Kiyokawa’s world through Nawa’s lenses, images emerge that even Kiyokawa herself had not previously encountered. Nawa, in turn, extends into painting the questions of perception he has long pursued through sculpture. And as viewers walk in front of the work—approaching it and stepping away—they, too, participate in its continual becoming.

“Rather than a garden to be understood logically, I hope it becomes a garden that you perceive, feel, and receive through your senses.”

Those words resonate not only with Invisible Garden, but also with POLA GINZA itself, as conceived by Kazuyo Sejima.

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Perhaps seeing the invisible does not require us to look harder.

Perhaps it requires us to open our senses.

Invisible Garden, now emerging in Ginza, invites us toward a landscape that begins beyond the act of seeing.