The Birth and Death of Local Style: the Pacific Rim Art Toy Scene, 1999-the Present

24 Feb 20232pm—3pm (HKT)

Art toys are original character figurines created by individual designers or small studios, which are not tie-in products for any media franchise. Since 1999, a large scene has developed around the Pacific Rim, featuring transnational networks of art toy designers, collectors, exhibitions, and vendors.

When I began doing fieldwork in the late 2000s, I found that while many Taiwanese designers consciously strive to create toys with “Taiwanese flavor,” they have failed to develop what Keith Murphy calls a “cultural geometry,” a set of aesthetic characteristics that are recognizable and associated with a specific place and its shared values. At the same time, designers from Hong Kong, and later Korea, who had no interest in giving their toys “local flavor,” did develop distinctive cultural geometries. By around 2018, however, these distinctive styles had become detached from their places of origin and marginalized from the mainstream range of aesthetic variations within the scene. In this talk, I will examine some of the reasons, both practical and ideological, for the rise and fall of local styles within the international art toy scene over the past two decades.