The rhinoceros, that age-old and mighty animal typified by the pointed fibrous protuberance that dominates his ungainly and wily snout, is native to the wilds of the Asiatic and African continents. Today, however, he may be found in every zoo, to satisfy the curiosity of young and old. Throughout history, his capture and imprisonment have been emblematic of man's abuse of nature – just like in every "Giant Monster" capture, starting from the dinosaur in the 1925 movie The Lost World, and the first King Kong in 1933.

Arriving in Venice by sea, you cannot help but notice that there's a new giant in the lagoon – meet King Kong the Rhino, a stainless steel behemoth weighing over 2600 Kg, almost 5 m feet high and 8.88 m long. He stands proud in the Marinaressa Gardens, an exhibition space made available for the first time this year to the collateral events of the Venice Art Biennale. The number 888八八八 evokes"good luck" to the Chinese ear. It rhymes with fa fa fa 發發發, that is to say fa cai 發財, "prosperity". The steel rhino's creator is Taiwanese artist Li-Jen Shih, born in Changhua in 1955. From the Nineties onward, he has centered all his art on this marvel of nature – the exotic animal par excellence.

The rhinos dwelling in Shih's artistic world are the third generation of rhinoceros in the history of art. The first is Dürer's famous 1515 woodcut. He was an Indian rhinoceros, gifted to Manuel I, king of Portugal, and by Manuel to Pope Leo X. Dürer never got to see the whimsical animal himself, and based his image on contemporary written descriptions. But that was enough to give birth to the air of mystery and legend that has surrounded rhinos ever since. The second generation is represented by Clara, a female Indian rhinoceros who was brought to Europe by a Dutch captain, Douwe Mout van der Meer. Clara had been born in 1738 in India, and had been saved by the then director of the Dutch East India Company, who had adopted here after her mother had been killed by trophy hunters. Clara grew up aboard ship, with the captain and his sailors. She ate and slept in their company, sailed the seven seas, and came ashore with them. In 1749 Jean-Baptise Oudry painted her portrait, while she was hosted with all honours at the French court. She also appears in a 1751 painting by Pietro Longhi, today at Venice's Museo Correr. Thus, King Kong Rhino's appearance, together with another substantial group of rhinoceroses in Venice's beautiful Palazzo Bembo exhibition halls, right off the Grand Canal, is fitting indeed.

For Venice's 57th International Art Biennale, the GAA Foundation has presented, once again, a collateral event: Personal Structures: Open Borders, hosting artists from all over the world. But this artist in particular has brought us a fresh and multidimensional interpretation of a deep-rooted environmental theme. In his earlier works, bronze sculptures from the Nineties, also present at Palazzo Bembo, the artist had concentrated on realism in his depictions of the animal: features, muscles, folds and pleats of the animal's hide, the visual expressivity of the overall physical composition. For Shih, the rhino, like the more distinguished Giant Panda and the lesser-known and more unfortunate pangolin, represent nature as it vanishes under the mortal blows of the most dangerous of Earth's predators: man. His rhinos, with their horns invariably projected skywards, all enact a dialogue between the earth and the sky, and cast a biological bridge between man and nature, as well as between the world of the past and that of the future. The horn, whether it be bronze, steel, or aluminium, is shaped like a thumb and bears the mark of a fingerprint on the front side. Visitors have asked the artist if it is a copy of his fingerprint, but Shih denies it. In fact, if you look at it carefully, the fingerprint is only a series of concentric rings: according to the artist, it is the sum of all the fingerprints of humankind, the one that contains our DNA, the original code that reminds us that we are of the same biological matter of all other living beings. Shih's rhinos incarnate significance from ecology, history, technology, and anthropology. They bear on their backs the history of Chinese Civilization: one of them is covered by the armoured plates worn by First Emperor Qin's funerary terra-cotta warriors (3rd century BC) in Xi'an. The warriors' armoured plates were actually made of rhinoceros hide, fastened by metal studs.

On Palazzo Bembo's second floor, next to the old, wrinkly, and slightly dejected Qin rhinoceros, is another similar-looking, middle-aged specimen. But instead of leather plates he is covered with metal scales, and instead of the primitive studs used twenty-three centuries ago, we find industrial-grade steel bolts. In the course of the years, Shih's choice rhino-material has become steel, and syncretistic religious meanings are attributed to its features: thus, the horn comes to represent a church steeple, a decorative element on the neck is a Maya pyramid, the bulging eyes and the shape of the mouth and nose represent the ones we find in Sichuan's Sanxindui idols, dating back 3500 years. On the back we get a glimpse of the profile of the kilin – a legendary mythological Chinese animal – and the tail is shaped like the blade of the Tibetan ritual dagger, the phurba or kīla.

In short, Shih's art narrates the historical route of mankind's civilization; Man and Nature's time and space are concentrated in the body of the Other, the rhinoceros, as a Different, un-declared, unrecognized "We". The environmental message is powerful. In the smaller room in Palazzo Bembo there is an installation through which rhinos level their most serious charges at us: a baby rhinoceros is crying on a carpet of red leaves, the autumn of civilization, upon which a blood-red horn emerges, tall, but also sharp, almost a sword embedded in the ground. On the wall towers another blood-red horn, amidst thousands of banknotes from every country in the world, the fruit of criminal illegal rhino-trophy trade. Shih's art production is not a mere expression of meanings and a historical quest: it involves experimenting with technology, and a futurist appeal. His rhinoceros has become increasingly personal in the course of years: thus, the "digital" horn, the bolts, science fiction set somewhere between Mary Shelley and Ursula K. Le Guin. In his steel and aluminium "Harley King Kong", the animal becomes a vehicle and the bolts are the magic texts that allow the author to ride this modern unicorn, or ancient kilin, into space: a protector-animal, archetypal being, friend, a defender of nature and of the harmony of the natural world.