Category: In the World

I am not sure if this is a valid topic, but I want to share it with your guys — The Dolls. They are not regular inflatables sex dolls. They are much more expensive and constructed with aluminum alloy bone structure and silicon skin to mimic human body shape with movable joints. Their costs ranging from 2k to 5k.

Picture1

Picture2

Picture3

I would call them soft sculptures instead of sex toys, because out their in the world, especially in ACG (animation, comics and games) circles, lots of people buy these sculptures for cosplay or they just enjoy changing nice clothes for dolls. Besides all these, these dolls often weight more then 30kg (66 pounds) and are pretty fragile.

I find these soft sculptures amazing because I never realized how detailed they could be. Picture 2 reveals some detail of the doll’s (in picture 3) hands. And there are people making a living by doing makeups for those sculptures. Picture 1 is taken from a painter’s house who was doing makeups for dolls’ heads to make them more alive. There are people (especially girls) enjoy dressing those sculptures up and it is just amazing to see how beautiful they could be.

Picture5

Picture4

China now is producing and exporting majority of these sculptures. All pictures in this post are found from Chinse companies. I also found several company pages that demonstrating more dolls. But please be careful, though I do not recognize these sculptures as sex toys only, they still have the function of sex toys. If you do not feel comfortable then perhaps do not open the link.

Reference:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Q4411w7ap?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0

I wasn’t sure if our examples had to be art, but I think you could argue this is art in a way. My example is Nathan Fielder’s chili suit (season 4 episode 2). In the episode, Nathan creates an inflatable suit which he fills with chili. The suit is fitted with a pump for dispensing the chili. He then wears the suit into a baseball stadium with clothes on top to disguise the suit, and sells chili discreetly out of it. While this is a pretty silly concept, I actually think it’s genius for a few reasons. First of all, I like the idea of inflating with unconventional material. I like that it is functional and wearable. I like that there is a mechanism for moving stuff out of the inflatable. I think these ideas can be taken further in other contexts. What if we thought of the inflatable as a system, with materials entering and exiting?

Okay I actually just remembered an artist who works with inflatables that I really do respect and is less silly than Nathan’s work. Lilah Rose is a soft sculpture artist from LA. Here’s what she has to say about her work: “I make soft sculpture, and I specifically make work that I hope will play well off the other elements of someone’s home. I want it to feel almost like a piece of furniture that lives on the wall. Something you could cuddle with. The home is such a precious place, and it’s very striking when you understand that the space you’re in is both functional and beautiful. The border between the art and its surroundings is there, but it starts to blur. I encourage people to approach me as an artist that will design something specifically for them and their house if they’ll let me. It flatters and serves us both, and it helps me associate with my work more as a form of portraiture.”

I got to see her work in a gallery in Berkeley last year. I love the materials she uses (often some sort of shiny fabric) and the colors (very dreamy and pearly). The pleating she does in some of her pieces is also so cool!!

• Shawna X

I think When finding Shawna X’s work, I was drawn to her use of color. This is actually the only inflatable work she has done, but her exhibit’s meaning drew me in further. She wanted to display the differences in eating and manners in western cultures vs asian cultures. I thought that her inflatables(not the mouth) spoke to her message and her meaning which has a lot of relatability.

The shapes of her inflatables go from the simple eye which is a ball, to the complexity in the jellyfish structure with many tubes. The whole thing just looks so clean. Seeing where the inflatables meet each other, yet look so purposeful pertains to what we are learning about how to attach our materials together to get the shapes that we want.

I find it really interesting how many of her shapes stay cylindrical but taper at the end and hold an S like shape, if you look to her piece on the top right. Thats something I haven’t really seen before and it gives a very child-like whimsical look to it.

https://magazine.workingnotworking.com/magazine/2018/6/6/fuck-your-manners-shawna-x-critiques-the-western-gaze-in-multimedia-exhibit

Link to Where you can read about Shawna X’s Fuck Your Manners Exhibit

https://shawna-x.com/

Her website