Shojiro Yamauchi – ある惑星住人

This wonderful series of metal sculptures by Japanese artist Shojiro Yamauchi (内山翔二郎) really caught me when I saw it at the National Art Center exhibition in March this year. It is called ある惑星住人　which I loosely translate as “Inhabitants Of A Certain Planet”, but since there are no definitive articles or plural forms for Japanese nouns it gets tricky to translate short sentences taken out of any context. Ants, a cicada and a spider with what seems to be a mini gun aimed at the cicada makes up this mini installation. The works are pretty large though. The cicada is easily a couple of meters across! I just love the details and the quality of this. Japan seems to have a lot of good metal artists lately!

Mr Yamauchi recently graduated from the Nihon University College of Art (日本大学藝術学部) and you can read a short bio and see more photos of the ants on his site here. He was born in Kanagawa prefecture and just finished an exhibition at a gallery in Yokohama, of where there are some nice photos at Maruoka’s blog here.