Exclusive—The Swedish Artist Behind Punch's IKEA Plushie: "I Actually Believe He Has A Soul."

Nobody Knew Who The Artist Was, And The Credit Was Going To The Wrong IKEA Designers. I'm Here To Set The Story Straight. Proud As Punch. An Overly Emotional Ode To Kindness As The Last Prayer

“He was alive,” A-C said on the phone yesterday from Gothenburg, “from the very beginning.”

“Han var besjälad.”

In Swedish, that’s a word, that translates roughly to “be-souled.”

She meant to say he arrived with a soul, and it was the soul she herself needed at that time in her life. She tapped into something universal.

It was 2017. Gutang was perfect, as soon as she lifted him from the box.

“He’s my son,” she said. “I never had a son.”

You know that feeling when you’re just so proud of a friend— an old friend, suddenly in the public spotlight?

You want to stop people in the street.

“Pardon me. You know the little monkey in Japan, Punch, who’s gone viral, after an IKEA stuffed animal became his surrogate mother when he was rejected at birth? My best friend in Sweden made that stuffed animal!”

The photo below is from 2017, when she had her first meal with him, after he arrived:

Before Punch brought him everywhere, A-C brought him everywhere. Including to foreign countries. He sat at airports, with her, at tables.

We’ve been friends, and I mean best, crazy, would die-for-each-other friends, since I was 17 and she was 20, in Örebro, Sweden.

Women know what this kind of friendship is like. Telepathic.

That’s the person you know as well as you know yourself, and vice versa. You finish each other’s sentences.

You dreamed of your unfolding lives together, before you knew anything about the world.

Over the years, those rather embarrassing dreams become a quiet, darkening shadow between you. It gets hard to talk, sometimes for years at a time.

But the love never dims.

When we met, in 1983, she was an aspiring young painter, later graphic designer, and clothing designer.

What nobody knows is how funny she is.

And I know I’m acting like I’m 16—overly proud, overly emotional.

Well, so be it. This is an overly proud, overly emotional, kind of post.

I can’t be the only one who is having a nervous breakdown from “world events,” and the overwhelming desire to be happy and silly over something.

In the midst of WW3 or whatever its proper name is, the terrifying news of today, I’ve been in a joyous reverie about my friend, and her creation.

His actual name is not “Djungelskog” or “plushie—” the IKEA collection he came out of is called Djungelskog (jungle forest) but his given name is actually: Gutang.

I told her “Oran” means “man” in Indonesian and “Gutan” means jungle. (Hope I got that right—it’s from Barry.)

Link here to unbearable cuteness of being:

Link here, to more unbearable cuteness.

Link here.

Link here.

That’s a good close up of Gutang. A-C said there’s a lot of AI, fakery, and forgeries around, but this is the real one.

“How did you design him?” I asked her.

“How exactly do you design a stuffed orangutan to radiate kindness?”

We actually need this monkey to be our national mascot.

Every American needs one. Many of us need two.

She spoke in great detail—people think all you have to do is give a stuffed animal big eyes, but there’s much more to it.

“I was adamant that he had to have a slight hunchback,” A-C said, “and a belly, hanging down a bit, and hair that stands up straight like David Beckham,” she said. “I was adamant about that.”

“They made him perfect. I’m telling you, he was alive since he came back from the factory.”

I imagined Giusseppe, dancing around his workshop with Pinnocchio.

We laughed—the home frequency sound of my best friend’s laughter began to heal my lungs.

Tears kept coming into my eyes as we spoke.

“You can tell the story,” she said. “I trust you, you don’t have to check it with me. It’s our story. I’m Gutang and you’re Punch.”

My friend’s artistry has fascinated me since we just met, in 1983. I remember bicycling in the rain in Örebo to her house after she called me shouting, “I finished it!” It was a large painting of a blue horse. “I’ll come right now,” I said. And peddled for my life, heart thumping. We were so intense.

Gutang is not a “mama,” a female, he’s a male stuffed animal. He came out of a book A-C wrote for IKEA, from the same series “Djungelskogen,” called “The Orangutang Is Afraid Of The Dark.”

Dagen’s Nyheter (Sweden’s New York Times) ran a short clip today:

Many people may have wondered how an IKEA monkey could have that much of an effect on a baby macaque , or on Japan, and later, the world. It’s because of the human artist behind him. And it’s a well deserved death blow to the growing and perverse notion that AI can make things as good as humans can.

I’ll start with a translation of her words, in the DN story, which was very well done.

Clip here.

Translation:

“Meet The Designer Behind The Viral IKEA Monkey.”

A-C says:

“To know that it can comfort people, or that children play, but grown ups also find some kind of relation with these animals. It feels totally fantastic.

“Hello. My name is Ann Cathrine Sigrid Ståhlberg, and I have designed this orangutan.

“I actually believe he has a soul. When you look at him and you look into his eyes, you see that he’s a loving and kind little baby.

“Of everything I’ve done, it’s this monkey that is my legacy. (Laughs.) I also made several books featuring this little monkey. In these books, I’ve gone deep into his personality, who this monkey actually is.

“The book is called The Orangutan Is Afraid Of The Dark. He gives solace but he also needs solace, this little monkey. He is like all of us.”

Yesterday, we talked about Gutang for over 1.5 hours, and it was as though we were back in our days of youth, as if I had never left.

How can I explain?

This monkey, Gutang, is not only a cute viral story. By sheer miracle, and the ingenious choice of a Japanese zoo-keeper who needed to save Punch’s life, (full back story here) he’s become a global symbol for self-soothing, for compassion, for protection from separation and cruelty in an increasingly brutal, AI world.

“He’s our leader, Gutang,” I said. “He’s re-connecting us to our hearts.”

It was also the case that he was re-connecting my heart to hers, as we once were so connected, before I left Sweden, in 1984.

A-C was at the airport that fateful day, as was Peter, and we cried to the last moment when we could no longer see each other, through the plane window. That’s how we were in those days. Pre-digital, pre cell phones.

Everybody who emigrates knows this pain, of leaving your heart in the country you left.

In the new land, so much opportunity; In your homeland, your heart, your very identity. In the new land, nobody knows you. You try and you try, but you’re in a foreign land. You’re misunderstood, met with suspicion, finally, often—ripped apart. Like Punch and his monkey troop, people can tell you’re different, you don’t know the ropes, the behaviors, the hierarchies.

You want to go home; You can’t. Home is where your innocence is. The new land is where you came to meet your fate.

“We have to be kinder,” A-C said, “to ourselves, and others. We’re all the same, we all feel like Punch.”

Even Tristan Tate is obsessed with Punch—offered to buy him for $250,000—the zoo declined. Thankfully.

Love gets buried in layers of trauma, but it doesn’t die. It’s your fossil record.

The whole world is staggering under the weight of all the love we have not expressed or shown, thinking we are rejected and shunned, hulking behind alienating computer screens. (And to be honest, often, we are.) So we perpetuate it, we armor up. Express nothing. Become, as Tranströmer said, “trilobites.”

The first thing I said to her when I called was: “I imagine all this attention feels awful, feels like pain. Dread.”

“Yeah, you get it. Exactly,” she said. “I feel that any success puts me under a sword of Damocles. I just want to work, I don’t want…praise.”

An American friend in Sweden offered to help her capitalize on Gutang. She declined. “I did the work, and he exists. It will be ruined if I try to exploit him.”

“You’re like Astrid Lindgren was to Pippi,” I said. “You made a character that symbolizes something that came out of your whole journey, that stands for the lonely. Now he’s in the world. He’s healing people.”

I want my own Gutang, to carry around; Place his paw on my head.

This was not by far the first time A-C and I talked about what she puts into her creations. Many years ago, when she started working for IKEA, when she eventually became tasked with making children’s things—textiles and bedding first, then stuffed animals, I’d talk her through bouts of insecurity, or artist’s block. Once she made a fabric with rabbits, wearing eye glasses. IKEA told her they weren’t “funny” enough, and she anguished over each line of the design, trying to make them more “funny.”

When I saw Punch’s story break online, and watched, like so many millions, the heartbreaking videos of his rejection, and the way he carried the stuffed monkey everywhere he went, it flitted across my mind. “Could it be A-C’s?”

Then, the other day, I was talking to Peter, and mentioned that I wanted to talk to A-C—that I’d been a poor and absent friend lately (the two of them are “my tauruses,” my best friends.)

“You should call her now,” he said. “I saw on Facebook that she has had some kind of success, with a monkey or something. It’s big.” I almost dropped the phone. “No way. It’s hers?”

I saw the FB post, and fireworks went off in my head. I know I get “too excited,” about things. This has been pointed out to me. Lately I explain that I believe I have: ADHD, PTSD, and RSD, (rejection sensitivity dysphoria) maybe with touches of autism.

We neurodivergents don’t know how to not be too much, what the Spanish call demasiado. We don’t know how to “calm down,” we feel too much, too strongly. We make, as my son said when he was a child, “a big deal out of everything.”

(He characterized the Farbers like this. His father’s side, the Bannisters, he said, by contrast, made “a big deal out of nothing.”)

Though it was set right today by DN, the internet had gotten it wrong—giving credit to a different design company altogether, who also worked on “Djungelskog.” I had to instruct Grok that Ann Cathrine is the correct designer of this monkey.

People are buying the $19.99 Gutang on eBay, for up to $350.

There are not only lines around the block in Japan, they have set up a whole apparatus, for the thousands of Japanese thronging to the zoo in Japan, hoping to catch a glimpse of their little hero. (Photos at the end of the post.)

It speaks to the alienation we all feel, the unhealed wounds of rejection—the tidal waves of love, fan accounts, and even EFTs that have spring up around Punch and Gutang.

Link here.

Shikano the zoo keeper, who have Gutang to Punch, is also famous, and has fan accounts.

These images below are literally hilarious. If we’d known this would one day happen when we were young, we would literally have never stopped laughing.

Could you make this up?

“Punch clings to his stuffed toy for protection when he perceives danger, but the caretakers provide milk and assist with meals.”

“…Our entire staff will put their utmost effort into ensuring that Punch can live a healthy and fulfilling life as a member of the troop and as a Japanese Macaque.”

I’m dying.

He’s not only getting accepted by the formerly rejecting troop, he not only has a new lease on life, after meeting a “…young, female macaque who has been gentle with him,” he not only is learning all the necessary life skills, he’t also the most famous monkey in the history of Japan, earning the zoo a fortune every day, loved by the entire world (none of this means anything to him) but he is being rehabilitated to become not just integrated as a macaque, but as a “Japanese macaque.”

This is a country and a people that still have their national pride together.

My friend Roland Kelts, half Japanese, an author, who lives in Tokyo, has been telling me for years and years: “You have to come to Japan.”

Once he came to New York, on a train from Washington DC, and the train was 30 minutes late. Roland was hollering on the phone—I couldn’t calm him down. He could not believe the train was 30 minutes late.

“You’ve lived in Japan too long to remember America,” I said. “30 minutes? We don’t have any national pride in our public transportation, to put it mildly.”

I was jealous of this magical land he lived in, where they consider a train that is even two minutes late to be an insult to the traveler—who must be apologized to.

He also told a story of being at some kind of resort, when a knock came on the door. A man bowed, and handed him his folded jacket. He’d left it behind. Not in the lobby—in another town altogether.

They tracked him down.

How come Japan never boasts about being the “greatest country in the world?”

The story of Punch only reinforces how much we have to learn from them.

I could watch these videos all day, and want for nothing.

Link here.

Link here.

I’m certain there will be Japanese Anime movies about Punch, Gutang, Shikano, and, the only non Japanese character — Ann-Cathrine.