The figure is nothing if not startling: Truncated just above the knees and suspended on four, bark-covered sticks sprouting from the body, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi's "The Sphinx Floats in Forest" is a muscular hermaphrodite with full, female breasts and male genitalia, an elongated neck and leather-strap "ears" draped over each shoulder — a part-animal, part-human being visiting from what might be a parallel universe.
You'll recognize the components all right, but never have seen them assembled quite this way before. The sphinx's face is profoundly serious, as if preoccupied with cosmic conundrums, but its well-turned thighs are filmed in saucy black stocking-tops that hint at — well, yes — intriguing tastes that certainly excite our curiosity, especially as it is not wearing anything else.
"What are we to make of this extraordinary entity?" I asked Funakoshi earlier this year while visiting his studio — fragrant with the camphor wood in which he carves almost exclusively — located in a quiet suburb of Tokyo. He described how, while starting with an idea already drawn on paper, forms and details appear under his working hands where he "felt they should be" and "where they would look right."