Oh Coco Cabana Has A Duck!

Miri’s Coco Cabana is never short of action, especially right now with the ongoing Miri Marina Bay Water Theme Park and the big yellow duck exhibition.The duck exhibition, organised by ATPD Sn Bhd, will run till July 21 and is open from 3pm to 10pm. Admission is RM5 per person and the first 10,000 visitors will receive a free small yellow duck.

Many Mirians seem disappointed that the duck on display now at Coco Cabana is not the same much-hyped rubber duck sculpture by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman that has been floating around the world, showing up in cities like Sydney, São Paulo, Hong Kong, Osaka, Taiwan and Seoul over the last 10 years. Another complaint seemed to be about the duck being placed in a small temporary pond instead of being put in the sea.

The rubber duck on exhibition at Coco Cabana

Hofman got his inspiration for the Rubber Duck from a 2001 museum visit combined with a popular yoghurt advertisement in the Netherlands. He settled on a duck design by a Hong Kong company called Tolo Toys. The yoghurt company Yogho!Yogho! financed the work.

In 2009, while the Rubber Duck was on display in Belgium, vandals stabbed it 42 times. On display in Hong Kong in 2013, it deflated on 15 May and had to be re-inflated before going on exhibition again on 20 May. It was damaged and deflated again in Taiwan on 2 November after an earthquake before bursting at Keelung, Taiwan, on 31 December 2013. The duck was swept away in floods in China. On 30 September 2017, during its exhibition in Santiago, the duck accidentally crashed, tearing a hole on its structure and causing it to deflate.

A “counterfeit” version of the duck went on tour around Canada in 2017 for Canada’s sesquicentennial. It generated some controversy as the $200,000 cost was seen by some as a waste of government spending. However the sculpture generated quite a big profit for the events it attended. This version was not approved by Hofman.

When I was on holiday in Taiwan in 2014, I managed to see the Rubber Duck on display there. The crowd was huge and the duck really generated so much excitement.

The giant rubber duck I saw in Taiwan