Using robotic devices to simulate living animals, ‘P’eng’s Journey to the Southern Darkness’ brings lifelike characteristics to lifeless animal bodies. The sophisticated mechanism of each automaton contain within them a notion that life can be simulated by art and science. By blurring the line between the animate and the inanimate, these inventions embody a philosophical question to our perception of what makes a living being. This question posed by automatons is still a recurrent theme of science fiction; what we think of the future is in fact deeply rooted in the past.