Prints are a series of work for which I photographed stuffed animals displayed at American Museum of Natural History located in New York City, and intentionally damaged the negatives with chemical agents and then printed from it. Just like the museum has taken lives from animals, stuffed them and displayed in the plausibly constructed showcases, of which the scenes are something we don’t see everyday, I wanted to create more-realistic-than-real images by causing a chemical reaction on the film. It was to reproduce unfamiliar beauty (the more it gets artificial, the more there is visual pleasure whilst natural features diminish) through a deliberate act, which somehow implies violence.  
 
  The second animal series (2003) is a group of photographs, for which I photographed animal toys in close-up. These children toys are the ones we see every day and made for children’s education, often made in China. They are produced in an ideal condition, driven by the two main factors, which are economical efficiency and mass productivity. We can see these toys anywhere in Asia, Europe and America. Animal toys are quite strange when we observe them real closely. Their forms, color and poses are way too artificial. They are quite different from the ones in real life. They look like what they are supposed to be to our eye and at the same time, I feel that they surely reveal a sort of distorted human nature. Or, am I taking too much of a leap of imagination?
As a matter of fact, these toys are tiny enough to hold in the palm of the hand. We look at them by habit, as merely animal toys or by their given name. However, what we face in the series are 1-meter tall images of photographs. When an object is enlarged dozens of times, we find new things that we overlooked before. However, what we find is not what the real animals, whose names were designated by mankind, look like for real, but instead, it is another kind of unfamiliar man-created object or the things too small to notice before.
 
  For the third series (2003. 2005), I first made hybrid animals by cutting and gluing different parts of animal toys. They portray bizarre kinds of hybrid species that haven’t existed yet. I painted the hybrids in red and installed them. They are new kinds of animals that we may possibly see in the near future, striking outside but in fact, created by harsh violence over other creatures. These hybrids in an accidental combination touch, with a humorous tint, the issues of our times driven by modern science and human desire.
 
  Overall, the animals in my animal series are synthetic creatures made basically to serve human needs and convenience. They are the ones that are showcased in a closed space, not in a normal natural environment, and reorganized by humans. They are seen as charming, unusual or witty; when I think about it the other way around, they are the ones that were made through a manufacturing process or a violent act. I found such a dual structure so ironic; the more humans put hand on, the better and more beautiful the things get, but their real features fade away.