Giant Torayan [2005]

Robot Guardian Deity Protecting Children

Giant Torayan is a gigantic robotic sculpture, 7.2 meters in length, created a s the “ultimate weapon of dreams” and a guardian deity for children. The work is modelled after Torayan, a ventriloquist doll with a short beard and a combover, dressed in the Mini Atom Suit (2003). With glowing and blinking eyes, Giant Torayan dances by turning his neck, moving his waist and waving his hands, while singing by moving his mouth and breathing fire as he follows children’s voices.

Yanobe spent six months in a residency at the project studio of the newly opened 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, in 2004, where he launched the City of Children Project with local citizens and students. Following his work for children, Cinema in the Woods (2004), young artists and students worked out a plan for a child-sized train, city hall, or discotheque to create a future city for them.

Giant Torayan is a giant guardian statue symbolising the City of Children in the 21st pavilion. Yanobe developed a method that allowed everyone to be involved in the production by riveting aluminium sheets onto a prototype made of styrene foam and covered w ith resin. In the exhibition City of Children—Prismatic Fortress, which showcased the project first time, fire spewed from Giant Torayan’s mouth at the children’s command of “Okore (Be Angry)!”

 In Yanobe’s solo exhibition KINDERGARTEN at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in 2015, Giant Torayan was transformed from a seated statue into a standing one with two legs. It also gave an unprecedented performance in which it breathed fire inside the museum. The exhibition has since toured Aomori, Yokosuka, Kagoshima, Thailand, and Tokyo.

At Suito–Aqua Metropolis-Osaka 2009, Yanobe gathered several of his works to form Torayan’s Great Adventure. Lucky Dragon (2009), based on Daigo Fukuryu Maru, circumnavigated the river, and Giant Torayan appeared in the Osaka City Hall. 

In 2011, to cheer up the Kyoto University of the Arts students, who were dispirited after the Great East Japan Earthquake, he erected Giant Torayan in an atrium gallery of the university with the students. Later, Giant Torayan became a familiar face to the local community at MASK (Mega Art Storage Kitakagaya), a colossal repository for art in Osaka. 

It is housed and on permanent display in the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, which opened in 2022. Here, Yanobe hoped it would play a new role as the guardian of the museum and children who visit it.

*Article source: SHIP’S CAT GIANT SCULPTURES OF KENJI YANOBE, 2022, Osaka: eTOKI.
(Translated by Mika Maruyama)