Giant Robot will present Papershapers tonight, Saturday April 11th (7-10 PM) @ Scion Installation LA in Culver City. The show features 3D paper art from ten artists including arguably the most-well known paper art toy artist – Japan’s Shin Tanaka.
Recently Giant Robot collaborated with Scion to bring Shin’s freely available by download paper toys to readers everywhere by including color paper toy templates for three new toys in issues 56-58 of the magazine. In true toy mania fashion — the three figures join to form one mega ‘bot. As part of this special campaign, a contest challenged creative readers to create their own design on Shin’s templates. The winning design by Matt Hawkins has been printed up and will be distributed during tonight’s opening.
We had the pleasure of dropping by the gallery yesterday while the artists were completing their displays. Shin Tanaka is in LA for the opening and it was great to meet and chat with him face to face. Awesome to finally meet the man behind the incredible army of genius paper toys. He’s assembled a four long-shelves full of his various paper toys including T-Boy, Three, Hoophy, his Giant Robot mega ‘bot (in small and large sizes). There are actually two color Scion Bots on display — one is the frequently seen blue, yellow, red, orange, black and white design. The other is a much brighter pastel-shade design — Shin’s original design which was later replaced with the one available in the GR magazines. Just a quick word on the vinyl front, One Up is set to release a ‘color’ edition of their T-Boy figure in the near future.
Since we’ve only ever seen Shin’s toys in photographs, after row of his paper figures assembled in one place is a sweet sight. If you can make it out to the gallery tonight, definitely do so. Shin will be there to fold toys with the audience. While we’ve focused on Shin’s work here, look for a followup post with the paper art from the other 9 artists in the show — some great stuff as well. The show runs through May 2nd, 2009.
Scion Installation L.A.
3521 Helms Avenue (at National)
Culver City, CA. 90232
310.815.8840
