Pervasion: Designer Vinyl Panel @ Laguna Art Museum

This past Sunday,  the Laguna Art Museum held a panel on designer toys featuring Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Jamie O’Shea (Supertouch Blog & Juxtapoz), and Patrick Lam (Munky King).  Both Gary and Tim talked through a slideshow of their art and toys including the key starting points such as the Sony Vanimals Capsule toys that launched each of their exploration into toys as an art medium. 

Gary always has interesting things to say, some highglights included info on Hot Cha Cha Cha, Venison, and another enticing figure off on the horizon. The elaborate coffin style box for Hot Cha Cha Cha is still about 2 months away from being done. It looks to definitely be worth the wait as he showed several color ways including his favorite, an all pink version. Beyond Hot Cha Cha Cha, he’s also planning to create a new vinyl figure based on Vension, his female character featured in his recent show in Barcelona.  Attendees also got a really early look at a figure Gary’s planning to release sometime down the line.   

Following Gary, Tim mentioned that his inspiration for making vinyl toys is an early 70’s Japanese vinyl toy.  Where some see those early Kaiju figures as cheap, he sees them as a benchmark to measure his own figures.  So to those that say his newest Alpha Gaichou figure feels "cheap", he says "thank you".  Finally, Tim showed a pic of a custom Be@rbrick which will soon be available as 100% Be@rbrick in an upcoming series.

Both Tim and Gary signed toys and other merchandise in the Museum Store which had Callis, Biskup’s Dunny, the new Alpha Gaichou and two lovely 8" Baseman Egg Qees.

This is getting long but it’s worth nothing that Jamie O’Shea dropped a great talk covering the origins of designer vinyl particularly the key role of the Japanese (along with the HK pioneers) who absorbed american pop culture and  distilled it into their own figures which later became highly prized back in the states.  He also mentioned that he feels we’re at a key moment for designer toys which will determine whether they grow in importance by embracing artistic challenges or whether they will fade with each status quo release.  Finally, Patrick Lam of Munky King talked about the origins of his Chinatown store which was originally planned as a backdrop for a movie he and his wife were working on.  He also showed off pics of Luke Chueh’s Possessed and Thomas Han’s Pusher figures; both of which are being produced by Munky King.

The panel was held in conjunction with the Laguna Art Museum’s current Pervasion exhibit featuring the art + toys of Baseman and Biskup which ends on September 24th.  If you haven’t checked it out and you’re in SoCal, definitely go see it before it closes. 

Laguna Art Museum
307 Cliff Drive
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
949.494.8971