정말 궁금하고 오늘중으로 (오후4시이전까지) 알았으면 해요 리플 부탁합니다..^^!

[수진짱]

공부하다 궁금한 것이 있어서 이렇게 올립니다...아시는 분들은 조금 가르쳐 주세요....
아래 주소는 홈피 주소입니다.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/news/printout/0,9788,216350,00.html



Wednesday, March 20, 2002

Cool and Collected


BY DAVENA MOK HONG KONG


①Meet Maxx, an 18-year-old graphic designer. He's super-hip, never smiles, has a pierced right ear and sports a few tattoos. A skate-rat, he wears low-rise shorts (to show off his boxers) and DC shoes. Oh, and he's 30 cm tall. And made out of plastic. But Maxx isn't just another Ken or G.I. Joe doll. Maxx has attitude-and a cult following.


②So does his 31-year-old Hong Kong creator Michael Lau, whose original, street-savvy figures have molded him into a hot icon among the most unlikely doll collectors imaginable: Tokyo's jaded, trend-setting twentysomethings. To reach that desirable market, Nike Japan featured Lau in a series of Presto shoe advertisements two years ago and Levi Strauss Japan quickly jumped on the bandwagon, using Lau to plug its Engineered Jeans line. Moreover, his appeal to the hip-hop generation seems global. His limited-edition plastic dolls have made it into toy collector shops in New York City and London. Young, cutting-edge international designers, DJs and artists beg to visit his apartment-studio when they're in town. Heck, even kids on the street ask him for his autograph. Now that he's earned a reputation as Hong Kong's most creative export, other local toy designers are following in his skate-shoed steps. So what's the appeal? "You get addicted to completing a set or owning something few in the world have," says Joey Ho, 27, a marketing executive who has spent $4,000 on Lau booty so far.


③Lau's dolls might not be endcapped at Toys "R" Us and eight-year-olds might not be throwing tantrums in the middle of a Wal-Mart aisle demanding a Lamdog toy. Yet, that's exactly the point: Lau has managed to imbue the humble action figure with kool-kid kachet. A grownup who collects G.I. Joes is a bit of a loser while a twentysomething with a full Crazychildren set is, you know, way datable. The artist is coy about his yearly earnings, but reiterates that fun, not money, gets him off. Many of his figures-like Maxx and the 100 other handmade street-punk dolls in his Gardener series-are unique. Even the factory-produced pieces of the 10 series he's designed so far have limited-edition runs of 500 to 1,000. That's part of their attraction and accounts for their soaring value as collectibles. When Lau released a punkish kid called Tatto in 1999, it sold for $19.20. Today at Toy Tokyo in New York City, it goes for $500. "Lau has a distinctive, original style that no other toy designer in the world has," says Peter Kato, the shop's assistant manager.


④Lau's creations are 3-D animations but more human than Bart Simpson. They're sinister, perhaps, but not scary. They look like the kids who hang out in the 'hood, but cooler. They dress baggy, down and street-chic, accessorizing with tattoos, caps, goatees and stylish sneakers. They pursue action hobbies such as skateboarding, wakeboarding and taggin'. Most have human form, but some have heads shaped like aerosol-can nozzles. Created from sketches, sculptured in clay and then modeled from plastic parts, each Lau doll is a piece of urban art. "I get inspired from whatever is around me," Lau says.


⑤As a kid growing up in Hong Kong's rural Sheung Shui, Lau, the son of chicken farmers, hardly played with toy figures. "We were too poor," he says. (Today he has 30 boxes full of G.I. Joe, Ren and Stimpy, Playmobil and The Simpsons dolls in storage.) An artistic streak led him to design college, then to a stint as a struggling painter and part-time window-display designer for a department store. Lau got into 3-D art by accident. "The big change in my career was in 1997, when my friends in a band called Anodize asked me to do an illustration for their CD cover," he says. "I came up with five action figures, representing each member." Another friend, from the weekly East Touch magazine, asked him to create a comic strip the following year. The lead character was a skater dude named Maxx who had a gang of cool, streetwear-stylish pals. The Gardener collective was born. Since 1999, Sony Music Entertainment Television has owned the Japanese license to the Gardener series and has plastered them on key rings, T shirts and Visa cards.


⑥Lau's success has spawned a mini industry in Hong Kong. Artist Eric So's career took off when he released a collection of retro-dressed Bruce Lee figures in 1997. So, 33, a friend of Lau, describes his recent Sprite-commissioned dolls and Vespa-riding Sam Lee figures as "playable artworks." Radio presenter Martin Lam, 26, creates hunched bad-boy dolls as promotional items for streetwear shops such as Tokyo's Double Taps. "They are all animated versions of me, my other personas," Lam says.


⑦Other designers and toy companies around the globe might mimic Lau's street-punk flair. But he remains the dude to match in the action-toy world. Rather than gloat over his global following though, he would much prefer to talk about soccer, traveling or snowboarding. It's not that he doesn't care; it's just that he's very chilled out-like Maxx, the plastic epitome of cool.

<궁금증>
①문단에서 A skate-rat, he wears low-rise shorts (to show off his boxers) and DC shoes. A skate-rat과 DC shoes의 의미를 알고 싶습니다...

②문단에서 Tokyo's jaded, trend-setting twentysomethings. 에서 twentysomethings 은 무슨 뜻인지...

②문단에서 Young, cutting-edge international designers, DJs and artists beg to visit his apartment-studio when they're in town. 에서cutting-edge 의 사전적 의미는 어떻게 되는지...

③문단에서 Lau's dolls might not be endcapped at Toys "R" Us and eight-year-olds might not be throwing tantrums in the middle of a Wal-Mart aisle demanding a Lamdog toy. 의 endcap의 의미...

③문단 Lau has managed to imbue the humble action figure with kool-kid kachet. 에서 kool-kid kachet의 의미를...혹시 kool은 cool과 의미가 같은가요?

③문단 A grownup who collects G.I. Joes is a bit of a loser while a twentysomething with a full Crazychildren set is, you know, way datable. The artist is coy about his yearly earnings, but reiterates that fun, not money, gets him off. 에서 is way datable 과
gets him off 의 의미를 잘 모르겠어요...

③문단 When Lau released a punkish kid called Tatto in 1999, it sold for $19.20. 에서 a punkish kid 의 punkish의 의미는 흔히 말하는 punky의 의미인지...

④문단They pursue action hobbies such as skateboarding, wakeboarding and taggin'.에서 스케이트 보딩은 알겠는데 나머지 두개는 잘 모르겠어요...

⑤문단 Since 1999, Sony Music Entertainment Television has owned the Japanese license to the Gardener series and has plastered them on key rings, T shirts and Visa cards.
에서 has plastered them on key rings, T shirts and Visa cards의 해석...

쓰다보니 이렇게 많아졌네요...
공부를 더 해야 겠어요...
이렇게 긴 질문읽어 주셔서 감사합니다....^^