Kaiju Encyclopedia
What would it be like to discover an imagined giant in the real world?
Kaiju Encyclopedia draws on SHHAN’s childhood memories of Japanese tokusatsu productions and monster encyclopedias to create enormous, imaginary creatures within his own world. Familiar feline bodies grow to dwarf cities and people, while monsters with different appearances and habitats are drawn as though being discovered and documented.
The project began with SHHAN’s memories of the Japanese special-effects films and television shows, and the kaiju culture, that he loved as a child.
The monster encyclopedias of that time classified and introduced imaginary creatures as if they were real. Beings with different names, appearances, sizes and traits inhabited a shared world. To the young SHHAN, these books felt less like collections of characters than records of creatures that might really exist somewhere.
This project revisits those memories through SHHAN’s own imagery. Its starting point is the cat: a familiar animal living alongside people, transformed into a presence that towers over humans, buildings and cities. The drawings imagine creatures of impossible size appearing in the everyday world.
The monsters do not repeat a single appearance. Some reveal immense bodies among cities and ruins; others appear before a tiny human figure. Buildings, roads, trees and people—things whose size we know—allow us to begin to grasp their scale.
People and architecture are not merely backgrounds: they become points of reference for measuring the monsters’ enormity. When a cat, ordinarily smaller than a person, becomes larger than a building, a familiar order of size is reversed. Humans no longer look down at a cat; they become small inhabitants sharing a world with a creature too vast to take in at a glance.
Yet these monsters do not necessarily destroy cities or attack people. Although they originate in SHHAN’s love of tokusatsu creatures, they are not simply characters made for battle. They stand in cities, look into the distance, move, or simply occupy a place. Colossal size and a cat’s characteristic indifference coexist, producing both fear and familiarity.
The title Kaiju Encyclopedia comes from the idea of discovering and recording different monsters, rather than placing them within a single, complete story.
Instead of following one protagonist, SHHAN imagines these gigantic beings living somewhere and collects their appearances, one by one. Each image functions as a scene encountered in that world and a record of a being. Rather than redrawing famous monsters, he finds new ones in the creature most familiar to him: the cat.
Sleeping Kaiju expresses this idea particularly directly. An enormous cat sleeps across a town and its roads; seen from above, the spaces of human life resemble a small model beside its body.
The monster does nothing. It neither attacks nor moves, yet its size alone transforms the entire landscape. What is a town to people becomes a place barely large enough for the cat to lie down.
The question is not what a monster destroys, but how familiar spaces and relationships would look different if a being of an entirely different scale shared our world.
In the earlier project Shhan, SHHAN also repeatedly drew a colossal black cat. That series brought one being out of a story to explore its scale, form, atmosphere and beauty. Here, the interest expands towards imagining multiple enormous beings and the worlds they inhabit.
This concern continues in later works that bring together cities, ruins, people and immense creatures. By changing a familiar order of size, they unsettle the assumption that humans are the measure of the world.
Kaiju Encyclopedia goes beyond recreating the monsters and tokusatsu productions of childhood. It transforms the cat, SHHAN’s most familiar creature, into a presence beyond human scale and imagines another world in which such beings truly live.
Like the monster encyclopedias he once opened as a child, the project is a record of the colossal beings discovered in that world.