From the toy box, Pop art

A muscular, tattooed Latino man plays pool just feet away from a flamboyant Japanese character decked out in an orange jumpsuit and boots. Though the aforementioned scenario may sound like a snapshot of the city’s culturally diverse street life, the characters involved -- a “Homie” and “Ultraman” -- are actually toy figures that stand just a couple of inches tall. These and other creations and sketches by artists and toy designers David Gonzalez, Mark Nagata, Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, David Horvath, Sun-Min Kim and Brian McCarty make up “Beyond Ultraman: Seven Artists Explore the Vinyl Frontier,” a visiting exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Its focus is the late 20th century vinyl toy arena that began as a movement in Asia and migrated to California, where it has adapted and become a cool and collectible Pop art medium.

The show is presented by the Los Angeles Toy, Doll & Amusements Museum, and it was curated by its director and founder, Maria Kwong. Her nomadic organization’s playful acronym, LATDA (la-tee-da) sums up its spirit. Kwong, who works at the Japanese American National Museum, and her cohorts began showing toy-related works -- old and new -- at art institutions in Los Angeles in 2004. And though there is no permanent LATDA collection per se, she does house an assortment of largely midcentury toys in a storage space.

Kwong, who grew up between South L.A. and Silver Lake, became serious about toys at age 13, when she had a small business selling her doll creations with the assistance of her mother, an artists’ representative. Toys hold important personal memories for her, but she also believes, “Whenever you have a discussion about toys, it unlocks so much. It’s very emotional connecting to things. There’s universality.”

Yet, it is this city’s diversity, she says, that has enabled toys, such as those in the current show, to infiltrate the local scene and be reevaluated as artwork in recent years. “It has a lot to do with California being multicultural and having a lot of ties with Asia,” she says, adding that Asian toy figures such as the superheroic Ultraman and robots started popping up in primarily Japanese areas of California, ultimately influencing a new generation of toy designers. Today, retailers such as West L.A.’s Giant Robot, West Hollywood’s Kidrobot and Chinatown’s Munky King have taken the concomitant creations, sometimes called “art toys,” to new heights.

Kwong dubs the period in the late ‘60s when the toys were first coming into prominence “the Ultraman era,” adding that it was “an age of empowerment where the Japanese were heroes” and “historically significant to Japanese Americans in the same way Bruce Lee is to Chinese Americans.”

Ultraman may be no Superman when it comes to mainstream recognition, but according to Kwong, U.S. syndication of the Japanese superhero’s cartoon series during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s spread his influence to the West.

The Ultraman era was one of the things that bonded toy designer David Horvath and his wife, Sun-Min Kim, whose Uglydolls are included in the show. Horvath, who worked for Mattel, says that many of his and Kim’s kaiju (“monster”) dolls were fabricated by the original Japanese craftsmen from the early Ultraman days. “The monsters were supposed to be green, but these would come out sort of yellow, totally wrong,” he says. “But that’s the beauty of it.” This “ugly is beautiful” theme permeates their Uglydoll collection.

A similarly irreverent spirit packed with a pop cultural punch is prevalent in Gonzalez’s “Homies” figure collection, which celebrates the barrio characters the artist made accessible and famous in his comic strip for Low Rider magazine.

As always, Kwong says, toys also encompass “a larger historical context . . . and love.”

--

weekend@latimes.com

--

‘Beyond Ultraman’

‘Seven Artists Explore the Vinyl Frontier’

Where: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., Pasadena

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Opening reception, 7 tonight.

Ends: Jan. 6

Price: $5

Info: (626) 568-3665, latdamuseum.org, pmcaonline.org