Astronaut Cartoon Mascot — Storefront Sculpture, Seoul

The brief came from a shop rather than a museum, which changes what the piece has to do. A museum sculpture is looked at once by each visitor. A storefront sculpture is walked past by the same people every day, and has to survive that.

What they asked for

A seated figure, 2.6 m, on the pavement outside the entrance, close enough to the glass that it appears in every photograph taken of the shopfront. The model was to be an astronaut, and the instruction on the face was the same one we get from almost every retail client: no face at all. A helmet and a dark visor, so that whoever is looking at it can imagine themselves inside.

Sitting on something

Adding the moon gave the piece its height without making it tall. The crescent is 1.6 m across, laminated as a separate shell and bolted to the figure at four points through the hips and calves, so the sculpture is structurally a seated figure on a beam rather than a figure holding its own weight out in the air. The inner curve of the moon sits at 480 mm from the ground, which is exactly seat height, and the shop’s staff noticed this within a week.

The finish, and why not white

A white space suit was the obvious answer and the wrong one for this location, because the shopfront is white. The scheme is a smooth airbrushed gradient running from mint at the boots through lilac to pale pink at the shoulders, with a fine neon wireframe grid laid over the whole body and a low half-sun disc sitting inside the curve of the moon. The grid lines are 3 mm and were masked rather than hand-drawn, because a wireframe that wobbles stops reading as a grid.

Finishing for a pavement

Everything on a pavement gets touched. The surface is a two-pack polyurethane under a UV clear coat, specified for hand contact rather than for weather alone, and the seams on the moon were filled and flatted so that there is nowhere for grime to collect along the top edge.

Afterwards

It has been photographed more than the window display it stands in front of. The client’s own note is in the panel above, and it remains the most accurate description of the piece we have.