Massive Straw Sculptures Come to Life at Japan's Wara Art Festival

The Wara Art Festival in Japan is an awesome yearly event where art students from Musashino Art University in Tokyo create giant sculptures made out of straw! But these are no ordinary regular sculptures, they’re oversized sculptures of various animals and creatures that stand tall and majestic and impress all the passerbys.

The festival takes place in the Niigata Prefecture, which is known for its delicious rice. After the rice harvest, local farmers have leftover rice straw, which they normally use for various things like feeding livestock and making paper. But they had so much left over that they decided to invite art students to come and create sculptures with it.

The students are always up for the challenge, and they use wooden frames to braid the straw together into these massive works of art. In the very first festival of its kind, they made giant snails, ducks, and huge mushrooms. And the festival was such a hit that it became a yearly tradition afterwards, and people from all over the world were excited to see what new creatures would be brought to life next!

Since that first festival, the students have created sculptures of all kinds of animals, from dragons to mammoths, gorillas and even dinousaurs. Visitors come from all over to see the sculptures on display in Uwasekigata Park, and the photos they take are a vivid reminder of the creativity and artistic spirit of the young students from Musashino University!

I think it’s so cool that the farmers found a creative way to use their leftover rice straw, and that the students are able to turn it into something so beautiful. It just goes to show that with a little bit of imagination, you can turn anything into a work of art! Let’s check out more of these cool straw-statues!

More at: Nigata