HAM Artgang

HAM Artgang is an art character created by a Japanese contemporary artist Takayuki Matsumine, and the character has expressed in multi-media artworks such as solid figures, paintings or NFT digital art. The artist Takayuki created HAM right at the beginning time of COVID-19 pandemic started back in March 2020 in Takayuki’s hope that the situation would improve as soon as possible, and created the character as the object of that prayer.

Since ancient times, Japan has had many natural disasters, and it is customary for people to create objects of prayer in order to overcome many of the difficulties. Eight million gods are a remnant of that cultural custom. Even for Takayuki, who has a chronic disease, the existence of COVID-19 that threatens the lungs and organ system was terrifying.

Takayuki’s grandmother was a craftsman of local folk crafts, and from a young age her business was to make dolls in the shape of a local farmer’s woman. The influence of his grandmother is strongly due to the motivation to produce Takayuki’s artist life today and he wanted to create a character that connects the world closed by COVID-19’s lockdown.

Takayuki named the character “HAM Art-gang”. The pronunciation of the word Gang in English is very similar to the “toy” in Japanese. In Japan, toys are toys that children play with prayer and thought. The sonic and semantic mix of gangsters and toys is very unique. I hope that HAM will be loved as an object that you can put your thoughts into.

From the first design of the character HAM, it took a lots of processes to get the final rendering result with animation.

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