We thought we had exhausted every form of charming ugliness the Funko Pops, or those Chucky dolls displayed like trophies of our sentimental age. And then, one morning, from a few workshops somewhere in East Asia, appeared the “Labubu”: little plush demons conceived by a certain Kasing Lung a poet with a scalpel, a taciturn genius who seems to have grown up inside a Grimm fairy tale censored by Freud.

The Labubu has the look of a modern chimera: a rabbit on amphetamines, a Gremlin who once attended a rainbow-pony boarding school, a Scandinavian troll deprived of sleep and therapy… Their carnivorous grin, hallucinated eyes, insomniac-elf ears, and tiny mutant-baby body inspire ambiguity: should we kiss them, burn them, or have them read Rimbaud?

Each new appearance of a Labubu sparks scenes of consumerist delirium worthy of the first days of a Hermès sale. Teenagers camp outside the temples of Pop Mart, servers collapse under the weight of desire, and prices soar like start-up shares before the crash. A rare Labubu can fetch sums that would make a Silicon Valley courtier proud, and rumor has it that some collectors would sell a kidney or a mother-in-law without remorse to acquire this plush Grail.

But beyond the farce, the Labubu embodies a strange aesthetic truth: they represent cute chaos, post-apocalyptic tenderness, bad taste elevated into a lifestyle. They are our doubles strange, weary, over-connected, yet stubbornly smiling for the digital gallery.

In a world where everything is becoming smooth, compliant, algorithmic, the Labubu remains a necessary anomaly a small, sincere monster, grotesque and sublime at once, like a plush metaphor for our age, or for our souls, which is to say, for the things we love despite their deformity.

FM