Toy Story
On May 1, 2013—the coldest day in May in nearly a century—more than 1,000 Hongkongers bundled up and headed to the harbourfront to welcome a larger-than-life visitor to town: a 16.5-metre-tall inflatable rubber duck. Some residents adored it: a headline in the South China Morning Post declared “Giant rubber duck has united the city”. Others weren’t so sure about the installation, which was actually a sculpture by the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. One animation that was widely shared on Facebook pictured the duck being bombed and sinking beneath the waves. But love it or hate it, one thing was certain: everyone in the city was talking about the big, bobbing bird in Victoria Harbour.
“It was totally different,” says Lam Shu-kam, better known as SK Lam, the founder of AllRightsReserved (ARR), the creative studio that turned Hofman’s vision for a six-storey-tall bath toy into a reality. After years of working as a creative director for a magazine, Lam launched ARR in 2003 as a inflatable sculptures, which launched in South Korea in 2018, then travelled to Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan and Qatar last year. In the next few months, Lam is launching a new series of ceramics with American artist Andy Rementer, a wooden figurine by Japanese illustrator Yusuke Hanai and, he says, another inflatable will be unveiled—this time in a city outside Asia—before the end of the year.
