This collection of stilettos has been created by Japanese designer Masaya Kushino. His latest series is called ‘Bird-witched’ and features three extravagant stiletto designs that draw inspiration from the art of Jakuchu Ito, an iconic Japanese painter who depicted “real life animals such as birds, tigers, and elephants in a really ingenious way, tinged with a bit of insanity,” according to Kushino in an interview with Blouin Art Info. The extravagant ‘Bird-witched’ heels are on show at the “Killer Heels” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum which runs until February 15, 2015.

The designer’s haute couture creations are unprecedented in texture, form and materials, as the philosophy behind his designs states that shoes are not just for walking, but that they can serve as standalone objects of art: “Shoes are just as visually stimulating as sculpture or any other three-dimensional art piece, but they also fundamentally have to be wearable. When it comes to artistic pairs of shoes, they are more instinctive and more interactive, which I think is their most attractive trait,” Kushino told Blouin Art Info in the same interview. His ultimate goal is to influence future generations with his designs: “I would like to find a place in history as a shoes designer in the future. People in the future would imagine how people wore and made the shoes if my collections are exhibited in museums, that is my wish,” Kushino said in an interview with Twelvmag.

The design below is called ‘Lung-ta’ (or ‘horse of wind’ in Tibetan) and represents a horse running as fast as the wind.

The pair below is titled ‘Healing Fukushima (Nanohana Heels’ and features an automated mechanism that plants rapeseeds (Nanohana) into the soil as the person walks. These seeds are known to absorb radioactive substances and were planted around Chernobyl to “revive the area’s agriculture industry which had been wiped out by the 1986 nuclear accident,” developers claim.