In Harrington Lane in Hobart, Tasmania, a monstrous teddy bear towers seven metres above the pavement in a vacant lot. Flanked by graffiti and shrouded by nightfall, its fur bristles gently in the breeze. Its gaze is blank and it has no mouth, yet it somehow exudes utter contempt. If you squint, it almost looks like Paddington Bear – if Paddington Bear was a mammoth machine designed to kill.
This is Giant Teddy – an aptly named work by the Korean-Australian artist EJ Son that looms above this year’s Dark Mofo festival. Its previous iteration was a quarter of the size: a human-sized bear shown at an independent Sydney gallery that danced and swayed.
Giant Teddy, meanwhile, stands ominously still with a military stoicism. Embedded in its nose is a camera surveilling the revellers before it, streaming to a TV screen a few streets over and an ongoing feed on the festival website. Giant Teddy is always watching. “Teddy has lasers shooting out of its eyes too,” Son laughs. “If you’re hit in the eyes with this laser, you will be blind. It’s so extreme!” (A technician on site will ensure no one is actually blinded.)
Extremity, of course, is the point: at this scale, Giant Teddy resembles the kaiju (gargantuan monsters) – of Japanese media. “I can see the Sydney Harbour Bridge from my apartment,” says Son, who would look out the window and picture Giant Teddy in a fight to the death. “I kept imagining Godzilla versus Teddy. I kept thinking bigger and bigger.”
Why a teddy bear? “I could have made a panda if I wanted,” Son says. “Or a horse.” But there just so happened to be a teddy “from a Valentine’s many years ago” lying around when Son was conceptualising the work – and it intrigued the artist as a universal childhood reference that also contained an undercurrent of peril.
“Bears are actually really dangerous, and very brutal. By making them cute, we make them non-threatening,” they say. “It’s like that for me as well, because someone would see me and they would never find me threatening.”
Pop culture has long been fascinated with the horror potential of children’s toys – extracting their innate creepiness by remaking them into nightmarish, demonic objects. It was happening as early as 1929 with the musical film The Great Gabbo, in which an unblinking, wide-eyed puppet drives its ventriloquist to madness; in the intervening decades, killer dolls and bloodthirsty plushies have made appearances in everything from The Twilight Zone to YouTube sensation Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
A few, such as Chucky, have become household names. Others – Squid Game’s baby-faced animatronic, or M3gan – have ascended to viral fame. Sometimes they’re not so murderous – think Ted, the bellicose, profanity-prone bear voiced by Seth MacFarlane.
Toys, in all their glory and gore, also feature in another work at this year’s Dark Mofo: Jason Phu’s operatic tragedy Without Us You Would Have Never Learnt About Love, performed by a sprawling chorus of repurposed figurines and stuffed animals. Among the throng is a smaller, decapitated prototype of Son’s teddy – alongside multiple Duracell bunnies, Winnie the Pooh and friends and makeshift companions constructed from cardboard and Mi Goreng packets.
Under the vaulting rafters of Hobart’s Baha’i Centre of Learning, the toys spin and quiver as one, luminous under stage light. For 14 minutes, they sing their doleful ditty: a sample-built composition featuring Rihanna, Jimi Hendrix and a soundbite from a video titled Crazy Donkey Sound Top 5 Donkey Sounds.
It feels strangely numinous. Phu sees it as a shrine. “We’ve probably all been to a cemetery and placed flowers,” the acclaimed Sydney artist says. “We might have photos of friends or lovers on our mantelpiece … or you’ve got a little bowl of trinkets your friends have given you. To me, that’s a little shrine, that’s a little space of remembrance. And remembrance doesn’t have to be sad or tragic.”
The opera, then, is a shrine to childhood nostalgia, even if the work is “a bit horror-esque,” Phu admits. It’s a collision between the past – the halcyon days of juvenescence – and the brain-wormed language of the present internet, where legions of online hobbyists “jailbreak toys or remodel them to sing songs”. The weirdest example might be the trend of Frankenstein Furbies: creations with names such as Sexy Furby and Long Furby where the hapless creatures have been modified with six-packs and endlessly noodly torsos, equal parts unsettling and alluring. Phu says they’re not a direct analogy to his work, though he does consider them akin to outsider art: “You know, I got a lot of respect for people just making shit in their spare time because they love it.”
Toys, for Phu, have earned their place in adult culture. “It’s the same as art, [which] sometimes people see as a kid’s thing. That’s why they stop doing it, [when actually] it’s a basic life skill to make art. It changes the way we interact with the world.” Like art, toys might act as a salve: “The whole point of them is to replicate some sort of companionship or familiarity.”
It’s a familiarity Son finds in Giant Teddy too, despite its fearsome guise. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how we all just want to be babies, and how we all want to be nurtured and embraced by a bigger entity… As an adult, it’s really hard to feel that way.
“I just really want to be embraced by a huge teddy!”
EJ Son’s Giant Teddy runs 4pm-8pm at Harrington Lane until Sunday 11 June, then again 16-17 June
Jason Phu’s Without Us You Would Have Never Learnt About Love runs 4pm-10pm at the Baha’i Centre of Learning until Sunday 11 June, then nightly 14-18 June
Guardian Australia travelled to Hobart as a guest of Dark Mofo
