Animals in the Museum - V&A museum_#1
Having visited many museums, I’ve encountered a wide variety of animal crafts.
This inspired me to create a series of artworks based on the animals I’ve seen in these museums.
As an artist, I am fascinated by the ways animals are depicted in historical art—not merely as decorative elements, but as carriers of cultural memory, power, and belief. Museums, particularly institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum, preserve these representations, yet they often remain confined within glass cases, distant from contemporary audiences.
Through digital reconstruction, I seek to revive these creatures beyond their static existence in paintings, tapestries, and decorative objects. By reinterpreting them in a 3D space, I question how digital media can act as a portal between historical narratives and contemporary perception, making these artifacts more accessible and engaging.
This project is not about mere replication. It is about recontextualization. How did these animals function as symbols of power, exoticism, or moral allegory in their original contexts? What do they reveal about the societies that created them? And most importantly, how do they resonate with us today?
In bringing these creatures into the digital realm, I am not just reconstructing their forms—I am reactivating their meanings. Through this process, I hope to offer new ways of seeing, questioning, and engaging with the visual heritage that museums safeguard, but which still has much to tell us in the present.
● Victoria and Albert Museum / London
In this series, I picked a lot of creatures from a 17th-century tapestry showing at V&A museum, this tapestry was made with Chinese silk imported to Mexico via Manila.
We can usually find a lot of bird shapes in ancient crafts.
Chinese mythical creatures with the appearance of a stylised lion.
It seems a cute frightened little bird.
A European-style crowned lion. Chinese people think that lion can drive away the evil spirits, so it gradually became the mascot outside the gate. Probably this tapestry was brought to Europe, this was why they added a crown on the lion’s head.
The large bird with bright plumage, probably a phoenix depicted as being similar in appearance to a peacock.This bird is surrounded by flowers and leaves of differing shapes and sizes.
These works I made are all based on real artworks in the museum.
Portion of a tapestry
1680-1720This tapestry was made with Chinese silk imported to Mexico via Manila. The red colour was made from crushed cochineal insects, which were native to South America. The bird in the centre is the mythical Asian phoenix, which is shown with the broad wing-span of the Andean condor. The mermaids play lutes, and some of the flowers resemble Chinese chrysanthemums.
This tapestry shows lots of magical creatures, birds and plants, including different coloured strawberries. Delicious wild strawberries grew in Peru. Merchants brought them back to mix with European ones to make the strawberries we eat today.
