Tokyo-based Scottish artist Jack McLean's creepy-cute anthropomorphized planks of wood are weird enough on their own, but crammed together inside The Container, a new art space in Tokyo's Naka-Meguro district, they are even more unnerving. Huddled in corners, leaning against walls and hanging precariously from the ceiling of a space the size and shape of a shipping container, they stare wide-eyed and astonished — as if you've caught them by surprise, perhaps just as they emerge from their mundane-plank state to find themselves disfigured at the hands of humans.
Most of the creatures bare sets of teeth, a few have growths of human fingers or lips and some even have eyelashes. One seems angry at the nails hammered into its head, another in shock from a number of razor blades slicing its face.
"I think a lot of artists find art with danger attached to it interesting," says McLean, while introducing the plank braving seven razor blades. But McLean's twisted family of timber comes from his subconscious rather than a predilection toward the hazardous. Images just pop into his mind, he says, and when they do, he makes sketches, quite often while standing on the train to work — his "salt mine" of the exhibition's title.