The person behind these works of art is Mr. Ko, a friendly man who could be an Elvis impersonator if he took his glasses off and slicked back his hair. "I used to work with wood, not metal," he says. "We made everything ・statues, masks, furniture, sculptures, all hand-carved. But one day, a customer asked if I could make him a robot out of metal and that was the start of it." Ko is very aware of the environment, which is another reason that he embraces metal sculpture. "It takes many years for a tree to grow back, but I realized that all this metal is just sitting here doing nothing ・why not recycle it into something that people can appreciate?" Al Gore would be happy. When he first started, Ko got a lot of help from a friend who owns a watch factory. "He gave me a lot of his extra scrap that he couldn't use, and I used them in my smaller sculptures," he says. But now that the production line ・and sculptures themselves ・have grown dramatically, he needs to buy a lot of product from scrapyards. He has about 30 people working for him, all skilled metal workers. They comb the many scrapyards in and around Bangkok, buying up pieces that they think they can use and then hauling them back to the main factory. Tiny springs, car doors, radiator vanes, motorcycle handlebars ・it's all fair game. "Scrap metal goes for about 15 baht (about fifty cents Cdn.) per kilogram now, which is quite high. A few years ago it was only 4 or 5 baht per kilogram." Once back at the factory, the artists get to work turning the pile of scrap into a highly detailed sculpture. "After cleaning everything in gasoline, we use pneumatic shears to cut and shape the metal," Ko explains. "Then we use whatever tools we need to start fitting everything together. We use arc, argon or CO2 welding, depending on what type of weld we need." Asked why most of his sculptures represent movie characters, he replies simply: "Because that's what my customers ask for. They all seem to want characters from their favourite movies."