The "Momo" Statue

Since I've been seeing it spread a lot recently, I wanted to quickly throw out there what this thing actually is just to give the artist some props. "Momo" is a statue (and no, that's not its real name) depicting a bird-woman created by the artist Keisuka Aisawa from the special effects company Link Factory and was put on display at the Vanilla Gallery in Tokyo Japan.

The statue itself is supposed to be the artist's representation of the yōkai, Ubume from Japanese folklore. Ubume was the reincarnated soul of a woman who died during childbirth. Some myths say she's a malevolent child abductor who snatches children to never be seen again. Other myths say she's actually a protective spirit who watches over children while they sleep at night.

So that's the statue in a nutshell. Unfortunately the statue, or rather photos of it, has been recently become tied to a supposed suicide challenge that targets kids and tells them to hurt/kill themselves (the validity of these claims is HIGHLY debatable, especially now that trolls have gotten their hands on it). So in light of that I wanted to try to give back credit to the artist as I find it sad their work has now been associated with something like this. I don't think any artist deserves that whether they create pieces of horror or not. I strongly recommend checking out the Link Factory's works. There are some extremely talented artists and plenty of creepy pieces to enjoy (including their Grudge Girls series). Just a heads up though, some of them include nudity and body horror so technically NSFW.

http://linkfactory.jp/contents17.html

There has recently been a new rumor spreading around the internet that due to the notorious "Momo Challenge," the creator had to destroy the statue. This is actually not the truth. The statue was destroyed because she was deteriorating as she was not intended to last forever. She was constructed out of a delicate rubber typically used in special effects props and had begun to fall apart. So rest assured, the internet did not cause her destruction. She was just simply not built to last. Here is a link explaining this further.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/momo-sculpture-destroyed-keisuke-aiso-802627/