It's Canberra's new conversation starter - the big shiny artwork in a pool of water that demands your attention the second you drive, cycle or walk past it.
There's plenty to unpick when it comes to Australia's most expensive public artwork, the $14 million stainless steel Ouroboros.
A snake eating its own tail? A symbol of life and death? A giant silver slug?
And when night falls, it comes to life in a different way - a sparkling object that's so bright it almost looks transparent as it reflects off the water.
It's an Instagram-worthy destination piece that will likely be the backdrop to countless weddings and fashion shoots.
But artist Lindy Lee doesn't want to talk about her epic masterpiece that now takes pride of place at the entrance to the National Gallery of Australia.
She just wants people to experience it, and make up their own minds.
"It's a thing with me, I don't want to be intellectual about it," she said at the work's official unveiling on Thursday.
"You must experience things first, and then that causes the curiosity and the engagement. So I don't want them to think about anything, just to experience it, and then maybe that will ripple on and cause some questions about connection."
The Chinese-Australian artist, now 70, cut a dramatic figure even when surrounded by people, in a black cloak and her signature black top-knot.
And the crowd that gathered on Thursday morning to watch the official launch of Ouroboros were treated to all the pomp and ceremony a bold new artwork could muster.
It was four years in the making, cost $14 million, is made of 13 tonnes of scrap metal, required at least 200 people and 65,000 hours of work to make it a reality.
But federal Arts Minister Tony Burke urged onlookers to look beyond the statistics involved.
"Lindy's work is never contained it - it has no actual edges," he said.
"And when you look at it at any time of day, the work of art - and especially when you see this one at night - it emerges from its physical boundaries. What we have here is brilliant not because of how many hours, not because of the cost.
"We have something that is brilliant because it was created by one of the finest artistic minds that Australia has ever produced in Lindy Lee."
Even the Governor-General Samantha Mostyn said Lee - a longtime personal friend - was a royal of a different kind, in a week filled with actual royalty.
"Here on this small pocket of land in this Sculpture Garden, available to the public day and night, bounded on one side by Canberra's civics buildings and new institutions, and on the other, Lake Burley Griffin, we all here today bear witness to a magnificent and courageous Australian dream made real," she said.
"A place where art and life, history and science coincide and coalesce to link millennia of culture and ideas ... where the rigid border between imagination and pragmatism, between vision and rationality, is challenged, penetrated and ultimately dissolved.
"Where an immense public sculpture celebrates the personal and the universal, and which, at its core, symbolises the potency and significance that Australian art can and must have in the social fabric of our country."
But Lee, amid all the glowing praise, insisted the work was no longer about her and the vision that has been inside her head, on paper and in the vast surrounds of a Brisbane foundry these past four years.
It's instead about the vast and enduring connection between everyone and everything in the universe.
"It is all part of cosmos," she said.
"It is all part of coming and going. It is absolute rhythms of cycles of birth and death and it's continuous."
The gallery is also displaying a small version of the sculpture, titled Abundance and made from $10 million in gold. It's on permanent loan from corporate partner Pallion, a precious metals group, and will tour the country next year.
It's showing as part of an exhibition highlighting Lee's works from across her career. Entry is free.
