Aki Inomata was intrigued when she read a story in 2009 about how the land an embassy is built on usually is considered a territory of the embassy’s country, not the host nation.

In her series “Why Not Hand Over a ‘Shelter’ to Hermit Crabs?” the animals move from one transparent “shell” representing one of the world’s cities to another, “from city to city, so to speak,” Inomata says. The artist has strong feelings for animals, which often figure in her work: In “I Wear the Dog’s Hair, and the Dog Wears My Hair,” she made a cape of her dog’s hair and a smaller cape of her own hair, so artist and dog could wear each other’s “coats.”

For the city shells, Inomata studied the homes of real hermit crabs, then created the pieces in acrylic using 3D-computer-generated data and printers. “People and animals can change how they appear to others, with such changes sometimes being made voluntarily and sometimes being made in circumstances where there is no choice,” the artist says. “We have to constantly live with other people’s awareness of ourselves.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Aki Inomata
Mission: By working with animals, to depict truths about human society gleaned from animal behavior.
“When a hermit crab changes shells, it utterly transforms its outer ­appearance, becoming unrecognizable .... People do the same thing.”