Tomihiro Kono, who is best known for his unconventional artistic wigs, has long been exploring hair as his creative medium. All composed of real human hair, the Fancy Creatures presented in this book are his most recent inventive wig fseries, designed between 2020 and 2022. Tomihiro Kono has always been attracted by the power of hair and the beauty of transformations. We wish to push through the realm of personality transformations through changing hairstyles, and this time Tomihiro’s avant-garde vision has upgraded humans to a whole new level of hybrids which we call ‘Fancy Creatures’ – imaginary hybrid creatures inspired by various micro-organisms on the Earth, ranging from deep sea creatures and furry moss, to endangered moths. As an object, hair intrinsically retains a unique power and intimacy even when separated from our bodies, precisely because it was once part of us. Therein lies the magical materiality of the fancy creatures, a unique series of entities that holds an ineffable quality — ancient but contemporary, familiar yet eery, desirable yet uncertain. These Fancy Creatures take us on a flight of fancy, to discover a new dimension of unforeseen beauty. Instead of covering the entire head like the typical wig does, these Fancy Creatures can be positioned anywhere, at any angle on the head or even on the face, thus it can also be introduced as a new gadget of make-up. For Tomihiro, it’s through imagination and creation that fulfill our everlasting human desire to metamorphose, to transform our earthly bodies into something else. We hope you, the reader, will enjoy our vision of human’s new metamorphosis.
