In Working Koala - Blue, Sasaoka Yuriko breathes unsettling life into a once-innocent toy. Nestled into the face of a vintage stuffed koala, three miniature screens replace its eyes and mouth—each looping footage of the artist’s own facial features. As her blinking eyes and mouthing lips animate the toy, the koala becomes uncannily sentient, provoking questions about agency, labour, and the human-animal divide. The work explores the complex entanglements between species, technology, and systems of power. The piece resonates with ideas explored in Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, which proposes the cyborg as a hybrid creature rejecting rigid binaries—between human and machine, animal and person, physical and virtual. In Working Koala - Blue, the koala-cyborg figure disrupts these borders, embodying the fractured identities of labouring bodies—especially those made voiceless through commodification. With the artist’s own features trapped in mechanical loops, the sculpture embodies the absurdity of performance and control, echoing the ways animals (and humans) are disciplined into roles within societal machinery.

Layered with sequins and vintage textiles, the object’s playful appearance conceals a darker core: a critique of how cuteness and nostalgia can sanitize exploitation. The work sings, literally and metaphorically, about labour, power, and mimicry, drawing from Sasaoka’s broader investigation into historical accounts of working animals and their symbolic transformation into tools of human storytelling. Both intimate and uncanny, Working Koala - Blue is a potent symbol of posthuman entanglement, a theatrical, glitching emissary from the porous borderlands of nature, artifice, and self.