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The Sculpture Garden at the Inokashira Park Zoo displays more than 180 works by the sculptor Nishimochi Kitamura (1884-1987) in the Atelier Hall, Sculpture Hall A, Sculpture Hall B, and outdoors. The Sculpture Garden was established when Nishimochi Kitamura offered to donate all of his work to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in return for a loan of land from the government for the construction of an atelier on which he created the Nagasaki Peace Memorial Statue. 

The donated work, numbering over 500, has been on view to the public since 1958. The Atelier Hall, which retains the original atelier architecture of the time, exhibits the equipment used in the creation of the Peace Memorial Statue, as well as equipment of various sizes. In Sculpture Hall A, a full-scale plaster cast of the Peace Statue is displayed and can be viewed from various perspectives. In Sculpture Hall B is his work from his early years to the end of the war. 

The Sculpture Garden aims to activate this collection by giving it significance from today's perspective. In addition, the special exhibition held in Sculpture Hall B takes advantage of the environment of the Sculpture Hall in the zoo to present new expressions by contemporary artists, born out of the boundary between art and the zoo.

Akiko Ayai "Bat" Original Illustrations