🕯️ Medicom Toy Exhibition ’13: When a Logo Became a Lighthouse #00002 TNoTToys Publications

🌀 This post is part of an ongoing research series from Art Toy Gama’s editorial division:
📚 This Is Not a Book About Art Toy Exhibitions & ToyCons

Our Upcoming Art Toy Book: 1000 Iconic ArTToy Exhibitions

Tokyo, June 2013.
Lights down, neon up.
Medicom Toy Exhibition ’13 didn’t simply launch products: it switched on a signal.
A neon flare in the middle of Shibuya, whispering to the world:

Toys are not the end of the Story; they’re the beginning of a Myth.

This was the 11th edition of a ritual Medicom had started in 2003. And by then, it was unmistakable: this wasn’t a manufacturer’s showroom. It was a museum of the now, where anime legends like Kamen Rider or Mazinger Z stood beside Be@rbricks wrapped in pop culture collaborations, and where the line between gallery and street collapsed into electricity.

Here, ArT Toys didn’t just reflect culture. They curated it.
Sofubi prototypes, 1000% Be@rbricks (including the now-iconic Karimoku collaboration), Kubrick figures, even paint samples: everything felt less like a product and more like a Memory device, a fragment of the collective imagination staged under light.

This wasn’t about what You could buy.
It was about what You were ready to remember.

🔍 Why It Mattered

Exhibition ’13 made one thing undeniable:
ArT Toys aren’t Trends. They’re cultural punctuation marks.
Signals telling us where to pause, where to resist, where to insist.

Every Medicom Toy Exhibition functions as:

• Archive: capturing the present moment in pop and subculture.

• Manifesto: declaring what toys can become.

• Symbol: connecting collectors into a global ritual of belonging.

In 2013, Medicom didn’t just show Toys: it showed how ArT Toys could become totems: icons that carried Identity, Memory, and Defiance.

As we affirm in our own Manifesto at Art Toy Gama:

ArT Toys are not made to decorate, but to carry Your Voice, Story, and Legacy.

🧬 Legacy & Mutation

From its collaborations with A Bathing Ape (like the limited BABY MILO Tee created especially for Exhibition ’13) to experiments like the Karimoku Be@rbrick 1000%, Medicom proved something vital: ArT Toys are not endpoints, they are interfaces.

Interfaces where industries collide, where memories overlap, where generations meet.
This is not merchandising.
This is Trojan Horse culture: an object that looks like play but smuggles something deeper: status, heritage, resistance.

Medicom Toy didn’t exhibit products. It staged a language.
A language where every drop is a ritual, every prototype a promise, every collaboration a way of hacking mainstream culture and turning it into cult.

And when we look back from today: with Medicom already written into history as one of the few brands in the Movement with three decades of continuity: Exhibition ’13 feels like an early lighthouse beam: proof that these annual gatherings were never about novelty alone.

They were about training us to see ArT Toys as living archives of Memory, Continuity, and Rebellion.

🎨 Poster Reading : The Neon That Refused to Sleep

The POSTER of Exhibition ’13 is a Manifesto in itself.
Massive Medicom typography in arcade-scale neon, fractured into primary colors: red for impact, yellow for energy, blue for technology, against a deep black void.

It’s not advertising. It’s architecture.
A beacon in paper form.
Industrial yet playful, ‘80s-electronica meets future-proof optimism.

Not “come and see,” but “arrive changed.”

🎯 Final Thought from Art Toy Gama

At Art Toy Gama, we believe exhibitions like these prove a simple truth:
Collecting isn’t about Trends. It’s about continuity.

Medicom Toy Exhibition ’13 was not just a celebration of ArT Toys.
It was the confirmation that Medicom had turned product launches into cultural punctuation marks: moments that cut through time like commas, pauses, and exclamation points in the story of culture.

And in the long horizon of the Movement, toward anniversaries, toward decades, toward the next century, the question isn’t what toys will come next.
It’s: What futures will we dare to write through them?

Because these aren’t just toys.
They are time machines in vinyl.
They are icons disguised as playthings, fragments of memory smuggled into the everyday.
They are stories that refuse to fade.

🧠

Still collecting what’s popular? Or are you ready to collect what matters?
👉 Step into the Movement that makes memory visible.
🎯 Explore the Art Toy Gama Store : where neon becomes narrative, and objects become You.

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#1000IconicArTToyExhibitions

We’re currently building an Upcoming Publication that explores and celebrates
the most iconic and influential Art Toy exhibitions around the world.

Each article in this series helps document, reflect, and invite the community
to take part in constructing this cultural archive — one exhibition at a time.

We’ve seen countless exhibitions since then: small and large, modest and monumental.
And we love them all.

No matter where they take place or the resources behind them,
every ArT Toy show adds something to the Movement.
Some will make history, others will make Memory. All of them matter.

This is not just documentation.
This is Dis(Play) in the making.
And You’re part of it.

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