In her work Milky Way - Breath, Mihoko Ogaki from Toride, Japan, turns a sculpture of a decaying body into an image of the wondrous night sky.

A recurrent image in art, this idea of rebirth, or the dead creating life, is a beautiful idea to contemplate. It’s always fascinating when artists can create a zen-like calm about the world and the cycles of life and death. When artists give us faith that the world goes on, it’s an aspect of the human disposition that we all experience and can connect with. 

But there are other ways to see this work that move beyond these eternal themes. As Constanze Friederike Rabanus analyzes in an essay on the Milky Way series.