^{Image Courtesy by Kouhei Nakama}

The Circles of Life by Kouhei Nakama

Having received a string of prestigious “Vimeo Staff Pick” badges for his videos, Japanese visual art director Kouhei Nakama has become something of an animation online star recently. A master of CG animation, Nakama creates elaborate, hyper-realistic textures and particles, which he puts to good artistic use by combining them with three-dimensional sculptures and expert use of lighting and camera panning to create his mobile compositions. 

^{Image Courtesy by Kouhei Nakama}

A recurring theme in his work is the human body and its form; his preoccupation with the subject has even led Japan’s national broadcaster NHK to commission him for a video especially for the Rio Olympics. Today, we’re featuring one of his longer works, titled “Cycle”, which he released a month ago and equally demonstrates his digital prowess and artistic thinking. Inspired by the never-ending cycle of decay and regeneration found in nature, Nakama created a series of minimalist scenes where this concept is explored in different ways. The video’s protagonist, a female dancer, seems to appear and disappear constantly, her body made of smaller circles, bubbles, spires and particles.

^{Image Courtesy by Kouhei Nakama}

For Nakama, this expresses the very nature of how our bodies regenerate themselves: “Human beings cannot be seen to change from the outside, but many organs and cells repeat the life and death cycle inside the body. In this video, I visualise this scene by magnifying and emphasizing it.” Playing with the concept of circadian rhythms and the ebb and flow of bioprocesses, Nakama creates a poetic dance of micro-animation that perfectly portrays how elaborate the human body is, and that transformation, change – even death – are part of the same, wondrous story of life.

more. kouheinakama.com