The Collector | ‘Toy as Medium’ art exhibition explores fun and games

Posted at the entrance of “Toy as Medium”, the latest exhibition at the Floating Projects art space, is a collection of thoughts about play as an activity: Plato’s “you can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation” and Carl Jung’s “the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct”.

To outsiders, this group show merely appears as a gamer’s playroom or a model-maker’s workshop, and this might have something to do with the venue. Located in a Wong Chuk Hang industrial building, Floating Projects is a self-funded art space led by independent artist Linda Lai Chiu-han, who is also a lecturer at City University’s School of Creative Media.

It is a place to meet, discuss, experiment and exhibit. In what is termed “assemblage sessions”, the space also becomes a working studio. In the weeks before this exhibition it was a workshop for 11 artists, predominantly graduates or students from the School of Creative Media, to collectively explore the culture of playing and using toys as art-like objects.

The result is a series of constructions and installations using toys, video games and plastic models; as well as some serious inquiry into the notion of recreation, as outlined in the excellent explanatory bilingual artist’s notes.