Daniel Arsham and Akira Nakai Built the First Slantnose RWB. Here's the Archive.

There are car builds and there are art projects that happen to involve cars. Most builds that claim artistic intent are actually mechanical projects with good photography. The Porsche 911 RWBA is definitively the second thing — and the distinction holds up three years after it was unveiled. ## April 2023, Tokyo At the Porsche Experience Center in Tokyo, as part of the brand's 75th anniversary program, Daniel Arsham and Akira Nakai unveiled a collaboration that neither man could have produced without the other. The car is a 1991 Japan-specification Porsche 964. It is the first and only slantnose (Flachbau) build ever constructed on a 964-generation 911 by RAUH-Welt Begriff. Nakai has built more than 600 cars since founding RWB in Chiba, Japan in the 1990s. Each is hand-built, given a name, and treated as a singular object. The distinguishing mark of RWB work is the riveted wide-body fender kits — aggressive, uncompromising in their physical presence, visually identical to nothing else on the road. The RWBA broke that convention deliberately: the fenders are fiberglass-integrated, not riveted. Another first. ## The Arsham Layer Daniel Arsham's contribution to RWBA is not the paint or the fenders. It's the conceptual architecture around the object. The interior color is "Arsham Green" — a specific Pantone from the artist's established visual identity, the same shade that appears across his studio practice, his commercial collaborations, and his sculptural work. Using it here ties the car into a broader visual system that exists in galleries, in limited editions, and in the imagination of the collectors who follow his work closely. The exterior is all-white, 935-style slant nose with pop-up headlights and a 993 GT2-style rear wing. The monochromatic surface makes the silhouette read as pure form — as if someone drew the Platonic ideal of the 911 in plan view and then built it in three dimensions. ## The Reference System The inspiration for the build was explicit: Japanese street racing culture. The Midnight Club. Wangan Midnight. The manga My Favorite Carrera. This isn't aesthetic borrowing — it's anthropology. Arsham and Nakai were working in the tradition of the people who built wild Porsches in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s because they loved the machines, not because anyone was watching. Arsham commissioned artist Kia Asamiya — known for anime series Silent Mobius and Nadesico — to produce original manga illustrations contextualizing the RWBA. A limited capsule was released through 2G, the Shibuya-based concept store that operates in the overlap between contemporary art, design, and Japanese street culture. The car was then photographed through the streets of Akihabara at night. Not on a track. Not at a studio. In the neighborhood the build was built to reference. That decision is worth noting: the photoshoot is part of the argument, not documentation of it. ## Why 2026 Matters for This Archive Arsham's decision to surface the RWBA as a 2026 archive post isn't nostalgia. It's an active argument. Three years on, the build holds. The fiberglass fenders, the Arsham Green, the Asamiya manga, the Akihabara night photography — taken together, they constitute a coherent creative practice that sits at the intersection of fine art, Japanese street culture, and automotive fabrication. Very few objects occupy all three of those spaces simultaneously without collapsing into pastiche. The RWBA does it because both collaborators brought genuine credibility to their respective disciplines and then built the overlap with care.