Vancouver's Humane Society is demanding a gallery dismantle an art installation piece featuring scorpions, snakes, crickets and other creatures.

The animals are part of a retrospective of works at the Vancouver Art Gallery by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping.

Huang Yong Ping, photographed in 2005, creates works that touch upon the 'dynamics of power.'
(Vancouver Art Gallery)

In Theatre of the World, various creatures are posed under bright lights and mesh shaped to look like a turtle shell, while a wood skeleton of a python overhead slithers its way across the ceiling.

Peter Fricker of the Vancouver Humane Society says the cages are designed to instigate aggression and the enclosures are contrary to the creatures' natural habitats.

The gallery's chief curator Daina Augaitis, who calls the retrospective "very powerful," says she will be meeting with Fricker soon but emphasizes no animal rights groups have been to the gallery yet.

The text accompanying Theatre of the World says the work "functions as a metaphor for the conflicts among different peoples and culture."

House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective features 40 pieces curated in conjunction with Minneapolis' Walker Art Centre and has been described as challenging established views of Eastern and Western culture, history and religion.

Huang Yong Ping's The Nightmare of George V.
(Vancouver Art Gallery)

Entry to the exhibit starts with two doors, one marked "Nationals" and another with a sign reading "Others." Both doors bring visitors past a lion's cage scattered with the remains of meals, animal feces and empty bowls.

Known for his bold statements, the exhibit also contains Huang's giant sculpture of a tiger on an elephant's back, called The Nightmare of George V.

"A lot of his work deals with the dynamics of power," Augaitis told CBC Arts Online in an interview earlier this week.

Huang, from the city Xiamen in Fijian province, formed the Xiamen Dada group in 1986, described on the art gallery's website as "one of the most radical of the Chinese avant-garde artists' groups active at the time."

The 52-year-old artist now resides in Paris.

The installation runs until Sept. 16 and will then move to Beijing.

With files from the Canadian Press