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Earlier this month, Japanese designer Junya Okabe released the first sculpture in a series called Animals As Art, a true-to-life, non-taxidermied polar bear mother and cub.

Got an unconventional space? Fill it with this unconventional sculpture and spare the taxidermist

Have a spare $150,000 lying around and an awkward empty space in your living room? No, two awkward empty spaces? No, two awkward-but-differently-sized-and-vaguely-bear-shaped empty spaces? Worry no more, friend, help is on the way.

Earlier this month, Japanese designer Junya Okabe released the first sculpture in a series called Animals As Art, a true-to-life, non-taxidermied polar bear mother and cub. Though calling it a sculpture is missing a few beats: it's sculpture with the ultrarealism dial cranked up to full, a 2.8 metre, 110 kilogram life-like rendering of a polar bear. With (optional) cub.

Okabe is an old hand in the Japanese film industry, especially in animation, computer graphics and modelling.

The story goes that he saw a stuffed polar bear in a shop window and was horrified at the senseless of killing an animal just as decoration. Besides, he didn't like how it looked. "I thought that an artificial specimen produced by our art-production technology would probably look better than a stuffed specimen, and that unnecessary killing would be avoided," he explains by e-mail.

So Okabe sought out Shinobu Matsumura, who Animals As Art refers to as "the No. 1 nature figure producer in Japan," to make a prototype. A few months later, production of the series, limited to 50 pieces, was in full swing.

The first version took six months to complete, and mass production sees one piece every three months as the team gets faster. Okabe, who unabashedly refers to polar bears as "cute," reveals that a couple of orders were placed even before Animals As Art announced the product officially on Jan. 4.

No new orders have rolled in, but Okabe remains calm: "As this is a very expensive product; we are not in a hurry."

There's a nobler goal to this small-scale, big-animal production, too. "The main aim is to abandon the production of stuffed specimens by killing animals," Okabe explains.

Promotional materials for the sculpture show them as decidedly interactive, with a young woman draped across (and talking to?) the bears. When asked if he suggests people play with their art, Okabe is unfazed. "I think that there is no restriction in art," he says.

"I think that the owner may freely choose to display it as an art work without allowing anyone to touch it, or to receive it as a family member and to live together." Animals As Art is starting slow, but has plans to unveil other models including life-sized versions of a lion, crocodile, giraffe, and elephant. You'll need a pretty big entrance for the last two.

Polar Bear With Cub retails for ¥13.4-million ($154,000) plus tax and shipping. Without the cub, the full-sized polar bear sells for ¥8.9-million.