The scene at the Taipei Toy Festival's opening day on Thursday was as re nao as any of the city's most crowded night markets. Browsers with overstuffed shopping bags jostled for space in the narrow aisles between booths, and long queues formed in front of popular vendors. The stinky tofu at this particular festival, however, smells like fresh vinyl, and has a name - Smery Tofu - and a face.
This year marks the fifth time the Taipei Toy Festival brings together toy designers, distributors and fans. The festival runs until tomorrow in the spherical Mira Department Store at Core Pacific City Mall (京華城). Exhibitors hail from countries across the globe, while attendees vary from high school students to businessmen. No matter who they are, they all have one thing in common - an ability to revel in the wonder of toys that has survived past puberty.
The Taipei Toy Festival is one of the most crucial events for toy designers in Asia, according to Koto Nishiyama, one of five members of the Japanese design team Devilrobots. The team is responsible for Tofu Oyako, the perpetually distressed-looking block-headed character that is one of the festival's mascots, as well as Smery Tofu, a variation of Tofu Oyako created as a tribute to one of Taiwan's most famous night market snacks.
"It is a really important event for exposing our designs to the Asian market," says Nishiyama. "It's very important for us to be here, not only for us to participate, but also to see our friends and fellow designers."
The festival began in 2004 when Jen Huang (黃仁壽), director of toy distributor Monster Taipei (台北怪獸國際有限公司), and fellow members of Toy League Taiwan (台灣設計師玩具創作核心), were inspired by Hong Kong's Toycon and decided to find a similar way to bring Taiwanese and Hong Kong toy artists together in Taipei.
"In the beginning there wasn't really a particular purpose or a reason for the festival. It was just for fun, because we all like toys and we wanted to gather our friends together," says Huang.
Word of the event started to spread, and the event's scope quickly mushroomed. This year, Huang expects to sell 20,000 tickets, compared to the 7,000 or 8,000 attendees at the first exhibition in 2004, which was then called the Hong Kong Taipei Designer Toy Exhibit (香港台北創作玩具展). Nearly 90 exhibitors from around the world will participate, three times as many as at the first festival.
The beginning of the designer toy trend, or urban vinyl, as it is also called, is commonly attributed to Michael Lau (瀏覽), a Hong Kong artist who in the late 1990s began making limited-edition vinyl figures based on a comic he created. Other artists soon followed suit, and the craze spread throughout Asia and then on to the rest of the world. The terms designer toy and urban vinyl are often used interchangeably because many of the figures are made from high-quality plastic and vinyl. Their creators often have fine arts or graphic design backgrounds, and the toys are usually produced in limited runs.
Collectible vinyl toys are now becoming increasingly ubiquitous in Taiwan as convenience stores and other retailers use them as marketing tools. Celebrity designer Demos Chiang (蔣友柏), the grandson of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), recently designed a line of figures based on Chinese gods for the Family Mart convenience store chain. This past spring, Hi-Life convenience stores released a line of Tofu Oyako promotional items, a collaboration that was facilitated by Huang in his role as the Taiwan distributor for Medicom Toys, which produces many Devilrobots designs.
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