Tokyo Bulldog meets DOGTokyo2017 and is so surprised! One of the amazing things about Takayama’s DOG sculptures is that real dogs react as though they are also real. This is a fantastic testimony to Takayama’s design because if she can fool a Bulldog then we know the elements of the design has a powerful psychology behind it.

This may seem like a grand claim but during the installations in London in 2010, more than once real dogs were observed sniffing under the tails of the cardboard DOG. This could not have been happening if the real dog did not somehow perceive that this sculpture was actually, somehow, a living dog. Even more strange is the fact that when more life like sculptures of dogs are constructed, maybe in bronze or wood, we have never seen this behaviour in real dogs towards the sculpture. Only Takayama’s cardboard DOG has, in our experience, been seen to evoke such a response from real dogs.

During 2015 and 2016 the DOG sculptures were taken around in Tokyo in preliminary sightings and evaluations and everywhere they went real dogs replicated the behaviour of their London counterparts. In the photo, you can see a bulldog in a park in Musashi-Koyama, Meguro, and it was absolutely frantic to get and smell the two cardboard DOG sculptures.