Installed inside Haus Nowhere in South Korea, a sculpture called Sunshine has become a viral object. It is an enormous dachshund, stretched to improbable scale, lying on it's belly and looks like it's taking a nap. But then you notice the faint, rhythmic rise and fall of its torso. The dachshund appears to be breathing.
Haus Nowhere is no ordinary gallery. Conceived by Gentle Monster, the space is something between a retail experiment and a contemporary art environment. It stages immersive installations that shift over time. Sunshine the dachshund isn’t an outlier. The brand has built a reputation for turning shopping into something that is performance, where the act of looking is as curated as anything on display.
The original installation is in South Korea, inside Haus Nowhere. That’s where Sunshine first appeared in 2025 as part of Gentle Monster’s flagship experiential space. However, there is now a second version of the same dachshund installation in Thailand, specifically at IconSiam in Bangkok.
Dogs, especially dachshunds, are coded as domestic, manageable and cartoonishly familiar. Scale that same creature up to monumental proportions and render it with unnerving anatomical fidelity, and the familiarity changes. The sculpture slips into what we would recognise as the uncanny valley, that narrow strip where something is almost lifelike, but not quite, and therefore disturbing.
Crafted to mimic the texture and slight irregularities of fur and flesh, beneath the sculpture’s skin is a system of actuators and air-driven components calibrated to produce slow and organic motion. Too much movement would reveal the mechanism and too little would make the illusion collapse.
Installations like Sunshine ask for time, or at least a second glance. South Korea’s contemporary design culture has become particularly adept at this—blurring the boundaries between commerce, art, and spectacle until they’re indistinguishable. Spaces like Haus Nowhere are known for catching your attention and holding it for sometime.
Sunshine unsettles you just enough to make you aware of your own perception. Because, in the end, the sculpture is a reminder that in the right hands, even a sleeping dog can become a spectacle by doing almost nothing at all.
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