"my pet" Serie 2007

In her works, the artist refers to the relationship of Japanese society with its pets. There are for instance more and more new breeds of dogs, which have only the size of toy animals. At the same time, Tamagochi and the robot dog Aibo originated from Japan. Both are articial creatures, which have to be raised, fed and dressed virtually. The borderline between real and virtual life gets blurred, the contact with these virtual beings and the actual pets becomes equally abstract and both phenomena resemble each other. Considering the self-conception of this “Tamagochi-generation”, Maeda with her naturalistic representations of hybrids takes these mutations to an extreme. Monkeys receive butterfly wings, little lambs with peacock feather tails gather in living rooms and panthers grow out of cactus pots.