ICONIC-1 was used as Clot’s JUICE STAND Pop-Up Store for the past month and a half. Today, we turned it into an exhibit venue for Bee Wong’s FIRE PANDA 10th Anniversary Exhibition. This exhibition is split into 2 showrooms; ICONIC-1 Store and its next door neighbor SOLEGOODZ Sneaker Boutique. I haven’t curate an artist exhibition for a long time, about 2 years. Setting up an exhibit one night before the opening, well, haven’t done that in a while….

Bee Wong arrived this afternoon, and we immediately went to work.

K from ONEWAY came to Shanghai for our friend’s anniversary exhibition opening. I actually met both of these guys on the same day almost 2 years ago. Is nice how the three of us worked very closely ever since.

Setting up. Crack opening each exhibition pieces. We were like kids opening up our X’mas presents.

Li Ming aka DAYBREAK. Veteran FIRE PANDA member, impressive illustrator in his own rights as well.

So what does this exhibition entails? Why both Iconic-1 and Solegoodz?

Paintings and illustrations. Of course, FIRE PANDA’s forte.

Customized figures. I just can’t help myself…. Each FIRE PANDA member customized one FIRE PANDA vinyl.

Customized PUMA shoes. Thanks to the support of PUMA.

adFunture usually drop a new item in each exhibition, how can this time be different? Especially with it being FIRE PANDA’s 10th anni.

So, let’s drop the big one.
I bought a FIRE PANDA 5″ like 8 years ago. Loved it. This time around, we made it big. I mean like 14″ big.

I’ll post more images after the opening. Better yet, if you are in town, swing by and take a look for yourself.

Don’t know where to go this Saturday afternoon in Shanghai?
Check out the exhibition of FIRE PANDA at SOLEGOODZ.

10 years into comic arts, Bee Wong and his FIRE PANDA will be celebrating at SOLEGOODZ with a handful of paintings and customed PUMA kickz.

Visited the Forbidden City in Beijing and saw the Cartier exhibition that was going on inside the national landmark.

“CARTIER TREASURES: King of Jewllers, Jewellers to Kings”
Louis-Francois Cartier established the Cartier brand back in 1847, and crafted items like the following for the royal families. In this exhibition, there are 346 original pieces on display including the ones in the following photos. Breath-taking to say the least….

Came to YOKOYAMA.
Just in time to check out their Yokohama Port 150th Anniversary Exhibition.
Needless to say the weekend there was crowded.

The show stopper was Francois Delaroziere’s La Machine.

Unlike the Transformers, this giant machine doesn’t transformer itself into anything. It is, however, a robotic performer that needs 8 people to control and “dance” to the music.

The sky was so blue, I was lucky that the weather has been great while I’m Tokyo so far.

Diet Butcher…. most sizes were sold out.

Finished my day with this for dinner. It was like $12usd….

When we were asked to collaborate with G-SHOCK, we decided to design a new character. Instead of putting, squeezing the design on a watch strap, we went back to a t-shirt platform. For SHOCK THE WORLD Shanghai, SHOCKA makes its appearance on this G-SHOCK x adFunture collaboration tee.

Expect to find this available next weekend via our website.

As for SHOCKA, expect to see more of it sooner or later.

“SHOCK THE WORLD” tour by G-SHOCK will hit Shanghai this coming Friday.

ICONIC-1 is one of the partners in this year’s event, and from today onwards, all purchases from the store will be accompanied by a G-SHOCK x ICONIC-1 tote bag. A neat lil’ item.

Visited ICONIC-1 Store on this beautiful day.
The window decor we did for the adFunture x Devilock promo brightened up the store front quite a bit.

This will be changed into something else again soon though.
Want to keep the store looking fresh.

Two YOKAs on my desk; NINJA YOKAs.

Made solely for my own amusement. Consider these as “customs”.
No production plans for these. (Note to lawyers: don’t bother emailing me)
If they remind you of something else, ……..NAAAAAH!

I’d like to introduce Indonesian artist, ARKIV, to you readers. He’s one of the artists we are working closely with, and upon product launch, we had the chance to meet up at Taipei a few weekends ago. Really cool dude with alot of heart for what he does. Fellow toy-blogger TRE did an Q&A with ARKIV after the festival, so I figured I’ll just re-post it here.

TOYSREVIL: How many times have you been to TTF so far? (Including this year)
ARKIV: this year was my very first time of TTF. it was really exciting.

TOYSREVIL: How was the experience - especially with the debut of your toys, and live painting! How was the response?
ARKIV: i dont really know what to expect from TTF, but it was wonderful experience and a really good exposure for my debut figure, ARKIV INSTANT. They seemed to respect and like what i do, and meeting people is always great experience. The response was lovely, there was one Japanese guy who bought 6 pieces of my figure at the same time, so he must be a very serious collector.

TOYSREVIL: Hardcore! Besides “work” - did you enjoy the event? How many days were you there?
ARKIV: Yes the event was terrific, and i stayed there for the whole event. The Air Cond on the first day was off for a couple of hours, so it was sucks haha, but when its on again, it was pretty enjoyable event.

TOYSREVIL: Besides debuting your toys - Did you score any good toys yourself? What do you collect?
ARKIV: People are nice and I scored a lot of free toys actually so it was great haha

TOYSREVIL: Anything interesting that caught your eye? That made you want to own or try to own the toy/figure/s?
ARKIV: nope.

TOYSREVIL: What was your personal impression of the event? A Success or Failure? And Why?
ARKIV: yeah, this is a big success for me or maybe a great step for my career, I think everyone seemed to love my works, even though there were more people buying cute and small toys rather than my toy haha cheaper and small toys are the ones that sold and suit the most at TTF.

TOYSREVIL: Any suggestions you would like to give to the organizers or attendees or exhibitors - to improve for TTF 2010?
ARKIV: The event was great and well planned. Lets hope there will be more exhibitors from the U.S and Europe or Japan. This year most of them came from Taiwan and Hongkong.

TOYSREVIL: What was your most memorable happening/incident/item of TTF 2009? I saw your tweet about the earthquake in Taiwan firs thing in the morning - that’s how I knew about it happening!
ARKIV: The earthquake. I was chatting with friends and all of sudden there was really huge earthquake. It was really scary and i try to calm myself down and the earthquake was getting bigger, near to 6.3 richter. I never experieced that before, and what scared me the most was i heard that the building is starting to crack, and i thought i was gonna die here. what a day and what a great experience.

TOYSREVIL: How about 2010? Looking forward to going / exhibiting again?
ARKIV: 2010 is the time for me to make more moves. I hope there will be someone, or more people want to promote ARKIV in the U.S or anywhere else. I’m also hoping i can do an exhibition in the U.S since i want to focus more on painting now, and be a great painter, but of course im still gonna design toys as well.

TOYSREVIL: In closing - please do share with us on TRE -Who is ARKIV?
ARKIV: Well, i used to be a serious collector, but since i design my own toys, i stop buying every toys available and became very picky in buying toys. I’d rather concentrate in designing one. My education background is architecture, so i would say that I’m the architect of Arkiv Instant. Arkiv is my nickname, so yeah Arkiv is myself. check my website out Facebook / www.arkivinstant.com

Something we are working on.
Want to produce something that I can actually use…

FIRE PANDA will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, and we’ll be curating its anniversary exhibition for them in Shanghai. Bee Wong, the founder of FIRE PANDA, was in town this week for preparation meetings. After work, we all headed over to Red Dot on the Pudong side for a nice group dinner. No work talk during dinner, that was the unspoken rule.

Bee must had a long day.. “Why the long face??”
He’s usually a cheerful fellar.

Ken. A new friend introduced to us by Bee. Pleasure to meet you.

Ming, or as I like to put it: MING.
Malaysian interior designer working hard in Shanghai, MING is also responsible for our new store’s interior design. Talented in what he does, the fact that he’s also a sneaker freaker doesn’t hurt our project neither!

I’ll be off to Taipei tomorrow, I thought I’ll post this for you.
Taiwanese streetwear label REMIX’s take on the Mini G-Robot project.
Is cool to finally work with these good friends from REMIX. We’ve been talking about doing something together for years. This is a small step forward for sure.
See you boys tomorrow, Eric!

A little “fan art” done up by our friends at Phenom Cycles for our studio member Yoyo, whom is a huge fan of Transformers. Is an one-off, just for kicks. Is gonna be fun watching her ride this on the streets of Shanghai, I’m sure alot of people who just go “wtf??”

Thanks to the boys at Phenom!