Borrowing materials from the fashion industry, I create large iconic figures such as a Buddha with a cherry blossom growing from its head. In other works, a traditional vase simultaneously connotes both fullness and emptiness and a wingless bird trapped in a prison cell can no longer fly. The process of producing large installations is time consuming and repetitive, requiring intense manual labor performed in a meditative state, hammering thousands of pins into a wall, not unlike a monk engaged in Zen practice. My works fall into two groups. In the first group, pins hold buttons that remain free to move between the surface of the wall and the pinhead. The constricted movement of the button, an everyday object as numerous and “ordinary” as people, as it is caught within the confines imposed by the wall and the pinhead, suggests the tension between the human desire for freedom and the limitations imposed by society. In the second group, countless pins are connected by yards of thread that create a negative space from the resultant image. The threads suggest the complex relations amongst human society while the negative space defined by the thousands of thread lines represents a void in the meaning of personal existence.