Yukinori Yanagi made a name for himself by getting ants to sculpt for him.

While getting his second MFA, Yanagi must have learned during that sculpture is too much hard work. All that building and hammering and thinking. Ugh, why do something yourself when you can get someone else to do it for you? He turns the ants into artists, setting them loose in sand-boxes or on paper, he simply records their ideas. Their main concepts seem to be escape and dig.

But it’s not just laziness (or laziness at all, he would follow ants on his hands and knees for days), he actually loves the ants so much. He wants to show you what ants think of flags and money and art (spoiler alert: not much). Animal rights activists however also love ants, and they’re not that into the way Yukinori uses them. They actually sued for the ants’ freedom at the 1993 Venice Bienniale and his installation was exhibited as ant-less sand designs. That’s kind of like hanging a blank canvas on a gallery wall, but people have actually done that too. Anything goes in contemporary art.

Yukinori is more than just an artsy ant farmer. Homeboy turned an entire island into a museum—he actually lived on a houseboat docked there at Inujima for a while. After making the island museum for rich folks he went and made an art center in a shuttered middle school on another island. Well OK, Japan is all islands. But Art Base Momoshima is for artists, including Yukinori himself. He uses the space to display some of his bigger works, like his MFA thesis sculpture which includes 500 oil drums, a car, and a giant hamster wheel. He can’t really get away from animals, he now lives in a town that made international headlines in 2015 for creating a Google Street View map from cat level, with pins for store cats and everything.