This resin art toy is off the hook — it’s a character made of urban mythology: Ishikawa: The Roller Warrior. ToysRevil’s ILIKETOYS has an interview with the designers and creators, snip:
TOYSREVIL: what is the concept for Ishikawa? what influenced you both in the direction of creating an original form, as compared to your customizing-styles that collectors have come to recognize?
DR BAO: We’ve been recognized for all kinds of warriors that we’ve been doing so far, so it was obvious to us that we wanted to create something related to that, but since we also like fashion, music, pop culture and urban art, I was thinking how we could mix and blend all these elements and create something from all that.
I had always wanted to do a kind of “samurai” character, but not a “simple samurai” – a samurai where I would take it to another level beyond what people are used to and/or recognize as a samurai. The goal was to have a character that will be very stylish and would be cool to look at.
(…) The final step was add a mask to our character. And since most of urban artists doesn’t want to be spotted or recognized when they operate, we add a kind of “skull-opera” style of mask to our character.
That really completed our figures….and if you do take a closer look at the character you will see that what we did was really to take the image of the traditional samurai wearing a mask, helmet, armor and weapon and I transpose it to the up-to-date urban artist image with a fashion and hip hop touch to it…..
So as you can see, it’s really a character that is very coded … I mean, there’s a lot of subtilities and codes that we use in it, and I think it’s what makes our character different and original. And the fact that we sculpt it all from scratch really help to have a very unique look too. (…)