A REAL TOY STORY

This collection is based on the connection between me and the mass-produced goods. Born and raised in an inner city of China, I consider the mass-produced toys and plastic accessories one of the most important components of my childhood. My parents took me to the small commodity market to purchase dresses and accessories to dress me up. With ten plastic butterfly hair clips on my hair, I felt like a princess.

I visited Mika Rottenberg’s exhibition this summer. Examining the mass production in China, she said “reality is wilder than imagination” in her interview. Mika’s work offers a surreal view of the hidden labor involved in the mass-produced goods. It is absurd and alarming. Me, however, was surrounded by the mass-produced objects and this synthetic world builds up my fantasy. My obsession of synthetic material and unnatural colors comes from the mass-produced toys I played. Through my collection, I want to use the process of toy production to tell a story that has two sides. One side of it, is me celebrating the “fruits” from mass production, a synthetic party. The tag “Made in China” is always associated with negatives and critical words such as “cheap” and “bad quality”. From my perspective, this tag makes all the fancy toys and adorable accessories accessible to me. Everyone in the world benefits from it. These “made in china” objects are associated with all the love and memories in my life. They are priceless for my childhood. The intense and hyper perfection I try to achieve comes from the visually overwhelming small commodity market. As deeply affected, I am just like a mass-produced toy and I would like to tell a real toy story through my collection. On the other side of the story, I also would like to expose the hidden labor in mass production and the darkness of it through a principle I called “turn inside out”. The combination of two sides leaves an open question as how people can assess the impact of mass production.