Ji Yong Ho

Standing next to a ram’s head ten times the size of his own, with a two-headed horse gazing his way, Ji Yong Ho flashes a friendly grin. The 29-year-old Korean has made a career out of sculpting larger-than-life animals. His Chelsea studio is filled with hyenas, horses, felines, and the menacing ram’s head. They’re all built from black tires.

“My concept is mutation—mutants,” he explains. The futuristic beasts have earned him a prestigious artist residency and live-in studio through the Gana Art Gallery while he prepares for a major exhibit here this April.

To Ji, rubber symbolizes mutation. “The product is from nature,” from the white sap of latex trees. “But here it’s changed. The color is black. The look is scary.” He tried experimenting with clay and bronze, but the sculptures looked too much like robots. “Rubber is very flexible, like skin, like muscles,” he explains. It gives him more freedom in capturing the animals’ expressivity—the horse’s wistful glance or the way the hyena cocks its hind leg, ready to spring into an attack.

Ho’s concept of mutants grew out of his life in Seoul, where there is fierce political debate over genetic engineering. In school, Yong Ho read Darwin and was galvanized by how his theory of evolution applied to man’s manipulation with nature. Already, he says, cats and dogs are bred to emphasize their domesticated traits and downplay their wild sides. The sculptures can be taken as warnings; if we’re not careful, we may soon lose the ability to see animals in their natural state altogether.

Yong Ho grew up by a school for children with Down’s Syndrome, and the children made an impression that stays with him to this day. “Their smile is very pure. I try to relay that in my animals—the look in their eyes. Somewhat sad, somewhat vulnerable.” He chooses animals that are often seen as “monsters,” then obsesses over every detail—each muscle, sinew and marble eye—to try to “restore them to their natural beauty.”

At first, people found his aesthetic strange, but that’s starting to change. A shark he sculpted recently went for $145,000 at auction, and last December, Gana held his biggest opening in Seoul yet. But the artist seems oblivious to this. “I’ve been making art non-stop since I was five. Nothing’s changed between then and now. The passion has always been the same.”