Cartoon Wedding Couple — Kawaii Sculpture, Taipei

The venue hosts about two hundred weddings a year. Their problem was not attracting bookings; it was that every couple had their photograph taken in the same four places, and the fourth one was a brick wall.

The brief

Something in the garden that couples would choose to be photographed with, at about 1.8 m so that two people standing either side fit in a phone frame. Not realistic. Explicitly, and with some force: not realistic.

Making it deliberately unphotogenic-proof

The trick with a piece designed to be posed beside is proportion. We made both figures shorter and much wider than they would really be, and pushed the head up to roughly 45% of the standing height. That combination does two things at once: it makes the sculpture read as harmless, and it brings the faces down into the frame of a phone camera held at standing height.

The blush ovals do more work than anything else on the piece. They are the only element that is pure decoration, roughly 90 mm across, and they are the reason people smile when they see it.

Rounded, and safe

A sculpture in a wedding garden gets leaned on, sat beside and occasionally climbed by small guests. Everything is radiused, the rose in the bride’s hand is modelled into the hand rather than being a separate piece, and the top hat is laminated as part of the head. There is nothing to snap off.

In the garden

It stands under the white pergola, and the venue has put a small mat down in front of it because of the number of photographs taken from that spot. They have told us it has become the fourth place, and that the brick wall is now empty.