Intermedial Dance and Acéphalic Butoh: Damien Jalet’s and Nawa Kōhei’s <i>Vessel</i> (2016)

Nawa Kōhei’s gallery shows mounted under the title Vessel (2016-19) used techniques of bodily distortion to explore what Nawa called “the idea of ‘liquefying’ and ‘dissolving’” the human body as “represented by the distinctive ‘headless’ pose”—or what the Surrealist Georges Bataille christened in 1936 “the acéphale” (Nawa et al. Arario ; Jalet et al. 2019; Woo-hyun 2019). Christine Chiu’s review of the gallery exhibition described how: twenty life-sized sculptures of human figures in seemingly impossible, contorted poses were arranged in a single row, their faces hidden or missing. The perfectly contoured black bodies are coated with shimmery silicon carbide powder, and were dimly lit by faint spotlights … These strategically arranged androgynous figures are not single entities but parts of a sum, jumbles of body parts that are assembled into a larger puzzle. Together, they prime viewers to contemplate notions of identification and anonymity, gender and sexuality (Chiu 2018). 1