If creatures could represent someone’s complicated inner world, what would they look like?
Molding pixels to perfection, Japanese sculptor Yuuki Morita delves deep to offer us his layered and colorful interpretation. The building blocks of his surreal micro-universes are steeped in a love of nature and myth. From stunning Ryū (Dragons) to detailed forest spirits, Morita fully employs his Z-Brush mastery to bring the rich folklore of ‘the land of the rising sun’ to the modern world. As a lifelong anime admirer, I couldn’t help but be enamored by the stylistic imagery generated by Yuuki.
A piece like ‘Taking Off’, where a seemingly porcelain tinted bird dissolves into glinting copies of itself, cleverly offers us an optical illusion where it feels like the winged ceramics might even gently float out of our screens. But what I found most intriguing is when the modeler’s poetic bestiary turns introspective.
A common thread in works like ‘Fear’ and ‘Thinking Man’ is breathing life into our anxieties and demons. Blending intricate imagination with emotional context, these works feel like an ode to the complexity of the human spirit. Thoughts are anthropomorphised in fluid electronic clay, a whirling vat of tentacles, claws and teeth, where biting anger is briefly torn by joy only to be sucked down into a cauldron of calm despair.
In ‘Depression’ on the other hand, the fiendishly grinning emotions have already escaped their faceless owner and float around him like mocking carnival balloons, weightlessly weighing him down. Something quite special about the artist is that he often produces these pieces in parallel as physical sculptures, case in point the astonishing transformation of ‘Thinking Man’ into resin and plaster. It’s inspirational to see the multi-faceted creations make the crossover without losing any of their impact (on the contrary).
Lastly, I hope, like Morita, we may all be blessed by the giant jellyfish of inspiration as illustrated in his piece ‘Imagine’, although I do hope its creative sting isn’t quite as painful as its aquatic counterpart.
