China has dominated the production of tin toys since the 1970s after Japan, Germany and USA gave up their tin toy manufacturing industries. While these countries have long since moved on the glitzier playthings, tin toys remained widely circulated in China for years. In fact, up till just a few years ago, when these toys became increasingly edged out by their more technologically advanced counterparts, many Chinese children still amused themselves with playthings that look like they have fallen out of a dusty history book.
However, tin toys are currently seeing a resurgence in popularity. Affluent middle-class collectors trawl the web and specialist shops to gleefully pick up these garishly coloured tin toys as retro curios. What used to be cheap amusements for millions of dusty-footed children have become collector-items for the few rich enough to spend a week's salary on a brightly-coloured windup tin robot. Why do these clumsily constructed items hold so much fascination for a generation that grew up on LCD televisions and ipods? Could the tin toys remind them of a lost time of childhood innocence and simplicity? Could it be a smug affirmation that their lives have progressed so much materially? As people both cherish and chuckle at these shambly, gaudy trinkets, they are reminded of their own histories and how their lives have, in the space of just a few short decades, changed almost unrecognisably. Liu Dao's Din Dang thus questions our shifting perceptions of self and how these ideas are shaped by our changing economic circumstances.
"Dang Dang" is an LED artwork of a marching tin toy robot intriguingly juxtaposed with a traditional black-stained teak-wood frame that frames its never-ending march. [Loo Ching Ling 吕晶琳]