Koji Nakamura’s Can I Make 100 Friends? grew from a puppet that survived a fire at a place important to him. Wanting to make friends for that puppet, he began creating a growing cast of handmade figures. Each is different, though their meaning comes through most clearly as a community.

Nakamura grew up in Japan’s Suwa region and draws on its animistic traditions, which inform his sense that the natural world and the objects around us can possess a living presence. These figures ask how attachment begins: when does something made by hand become a companion?