Giant duck floats into Hong Kong Harbor

Made you look! This is one seriously charming sculpture floating its way into harbors around the world. It just arrived in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor where it was met by officials, teams of child dancers and other large rubber duckies, but nothing close to the one bobbing in the bay.

Dutch artist, Florentijn Hoffman, has been creating very, very large sculptures to make an impression. He says he wants people to stop and really look, to consider their surroundings, to slow down. A giant rubber duck is just that - slow. Its ponderous procession is continuing to 13 cities around the globe and has already been ogled in Osaka and Sydney.

Created as an inflatable floater, the duck is just over 85 feet high – big enough to dwarf most other boats and buildings. It makes you feel childlike and giddy. That's just fine with Hoffman. There’s no agenda really, he says on his website; the fun is indiscriminate and apolitical.

Other pieces of his artwork haven’t been so passive. In Sao Paolo, a giant monkey materialized from rubber flip-flops became a practical Brazilian icon. The monkey leaned and draped across schoolyards and buildings, reconnecting many with their childhoods and simpler times.

The sculptures are deceptively simple but it takes years of planning, negotiations and months of effort to build them. Each of his sculptures is site and scale specific, then moved to different locations each taking many considerations into account.

His artworks include:

• An enormous rabbit, the Giant of Vlaardingen, which took months to construct from salvaged wood collected by the community.

• A two story high, jet black crow standing in stark contrast to the bright white building behind it.
• A lion, the size of a T-Rex, made from planks of found wood, straddling a wall in Senegal.

The inspirations are drawn from every-day objects re-imagined by a creative brain that toys with perception and are very popular. People are voting with their feet and smiles, but should you find the Duck coming to your town, consider waiting a day or two to get the full impact without fighting for a glimpse in the crowd.

Where do you think it will pop up in the U.S.?

Photo 1 courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons by Teking and Photo 2 by Crystalline Radical