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Can I Make 100 Friends? (Friends No. 144)
Koji Nakamura Japanese, b. 2001
Can I Make 100 Friends? (No. 144), 2026
Clay, cotton, ABS, thread, wool, acrylic paint, yarn, fake fur
39 × 14 × 13 cm
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...
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?
Exhibitions
On a Bit of Earth Which Had No Name