Monster:Black, 1998. Fabric, cotton filling, sequins, silicone,222x180x210 cm.
	" The butterfly pieces are part of a whole series of work entitled Alibi. The imagery and the reference is to Madame Butterfly, the Puccini opera, and its misguided fantasies and ideals about what constitutes Asian femininity. The obvious reference appears in the butterfly which is caught in a hand made of silicone. in both Eastern and Western cultures there is this long tradition of embodying enduring values through nature, because it seems to be beyond human manipulation, intervention and so on. But the butterfly in the work is a dried butterfly that appears alive but is in fact preserved, so it refers to a certain amount of preservation of old ideas that continue to exercise the force of immediacy. The material of the hand is silicone, which of course is often used in medical technology for enhancements of the body. Using both artificial material that is sometimes substituted for enduring, "transcendent" beliefs, I was trying to undermine their conventional functions and meanings "         >- from interview with hans-Ulrich Obrist