ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

Yukinori Dehara, David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim opened a collab show at Giant Robot in L.A. this weekend. Dehara’s work is lesser known on our shores, but with a bump from the UglyDoll creators (David Horvath called Dehara his “#1 favorite artist” on his blog), U.S. collectors are bound to start paying attention. The Japanese artist has a vast body of work spanning over a decade, and describes his clay depictions of debauched and mutated people and monsters as “crummy” style.

Because of UglyDolls’ popularity with the youngsters, Horvath issued a disclaimer for the show on his blog stating:

[Dehara's] specialty is dead zombies and dying/drunk yakuza guys with turquoise open wounds, neon guts flying around, and multi colored private parts showing! Just FYI if you’re going to bring the kids…

You can get a sense of what he’s talking about by looking at the eviscerated children on the show flier or with one of the exhibit’s most coveted figures, Morlin, above. (Image via Giant Robot. For their slideshow, click here.)

The Deharavath show focused on Dehara’s Zombie Children. For a comprehensive look at his figures and other art, click the pictures (or find a Japanese translator) at his website. Horvath and Kim played more of a supporting role in the show, though they brought drawings, paintings and handmade plushes. Some of the highlights of the show were a special Ice Bat kaiju figure made in conjunction with Dehara and one-of-a-kind framed drawings by Horvath in the Dehara style. (Above image of Zombie Children and below Horvath drawing via Slack on Skullbrain. For many excellent closeup photos of the show, click here and scroll to the middle of the page to read the post.)