[On-site Sketch] Looking back at 20 years of the pioneer of Korean art toy culture... Coolrain solo exhibition 《ART TOY : PIECES of COOLRAIN》

Artpize is holding the solo exhibition 《ART TOY : PIECES of COOLRAIN》 by Coolrain until November 22 as its first exhibition to celebrate its opening.

《ART TOY : PIECES of COOLRAIN》 is an exhibition that multidimensionally highlights the creative world of Coolrain (real name Lee Chan-woo) spanning over 20 years through finished works, production processes, and archival materials. As the first exhibition to celebrate the opening of Artpize, it is organized so that the world of characters and modeling built by a first-generation Korean art toy artist can be viewed in one space.

Coolrain is a first-generation figure artist who has pioneered Korean art toy culture. He began teaching himself toy production in 2004, a time when even the concept of "art toy" was unfamiliar in Korea, and has since built an original creative world that combines sculpture, fashion, music, sports, and street culture.

His work does not stop at merely making characters with cute or whimsical appearances. He meticulously designs detailed elements such as human proportions and joint structures, clothing textures and wrinkles, and shoes and accessories to model the attitude and personality of the figures. A significant characteristic of Coolrain's work is capturing a person's taste, the atmosphere of an era, and cultural memories within a small figure.

Coolrain has steadily developed his own characters and worldviews, such as Monsterz Crew, Dunkeys, and Amoebahood. While each character is an independent sculpture, they are connected to the cultures the artist has long observed and experienced, such as music, basketball, fashion, and street culture. As a result, Coolrain's works naturally cross the boundaries between toys and sculpture, and design and art.

In particular, collaborations with global brands including NIKE, NBA, and Disney, as well as artists from various fields such as BTS and Dynamic Duo, show how Coolrain's modeling language can expand within popular culture. His characteristic approach is not simply applying the identity of the collaboration subject to the character, but reinterpreting different cultural codes and narratives into a single three-dimensional figure.

Coolrain's work, which has continued for over 20 years, is closely linked to the process of Korean art toys establishing themselves as an independent creative genre. He places significant meaning not only on the finished products but also on the process in which characters are born and the traces of production. All the stages—from hand-drawn sketches, designs to check proportions, sculpture and modification, to reproduction and painting—that constitute his work until a single art toy is completed, form his creative world.

The 'PIECES' in this exhibition title does not simply refer to the number of sculptural works. It signifies the countless thoughts and choices, sketches and revisions, materials and parts, and the pieces of memories accumulated within the artist's time that complete a single work. While this exhibition focuses on completed works, it also presents the traces of production left beside them, allowing visitors to follow not only the results of the works but also their birth process.
 

Approximately 200 items are introduced in the exhibition hall, including Coolrain's representative characters and major collaboration works, as well as sketches, work records, and archival materials related to the production stages. One can observe how original characters, such as Coolrain's representative characters Monsterz Crew, Dunkeys, and Amoebahood, have changed according to eras and media. Furthermore, as the completed works and process materials are interconnected, one can naturally read the process of how two-dimensional ideas transform into three-dimensional art toys.

This exhibition does not stop at a single artist's retrospective. It is intended to show how art toys have become a medium that contains individual tastes and narratives, and what possibilities they have created between plastic arts and pop culture, and between brands and collecting culture.

An official from the exhibition stated, "This exhibition shows the way art toys meet pop culture through collaborations with the fields of sports, fashion, music, and entertainment," adding, "Choosing Coolrain's archive as the first exhibition to commemorate the opening also demonstrates the direction of this space, which is to look back at the beginning and present of Korean art toys and to connect the creation and collecting culture of the next generation."