This exhibition is the first in a new series that features recent work by artists from Pacific Rim countries and cultures who explore new narrative territory using animation, digital techniques, video, and film. Plastic Life looks at the ways artists weave the past and the present; the local and the universal; the ancient and the futuristic. Included are the works by Japanese-American artist Bruce Yonemoto, who lives in Los Angeles; Goang-ming Yuan, from Taiwan; Korean-born Hye Rim Lee, who lives in New Zealand; as well as exciting emerging artists.

Taijin Takeuchi

A Wolf Loves Pork, 2008

Stop-motion animation, 3:55 seconds

A young prodigy of stop-action animation, Takeuchi received a BFA in visual communication design from the Kyushu Institute of Design and an MFA in imaging arts and science from the Musashino Art University in Japan. His stop-action animation, A Wolf Loves Pork, is a collage of sorts, created from thousands of individual still photographs. The cartoon-like chase begins on the desk in a young man’s bedroom in a typical apartment building in Tokyo, when the predator spots his prey--a paper-mâché pig—and pursues the creature through the building and out into a city park, finally culminating in a showdown at water's edge.