Sean Wotherspoon and Tarmac Works unveil art-car drop in Beijing

Sean Wotherspoon and Tarmac Works didn’t just bring a couple of model cars to Beijing. They built a collector bait package around them, pairing an Audi R8 LMS GT3 Art Car and a Nissan GT-R R32 with trading cards, apparel, and pins in a drop that feels closer to a sneaker release than a standard die-cast launch.

The first hit landed at the Beijing HEC Hobby Show on April 17, where the Audi R8 LMS GT3 Art Car, trading cards, apparel, and pins were sold exclusively at booth 5U17 through April 19. The online release is set for May 12, while the Nissan GT-R R32 Art Car details were still being held back. That staggered rollout is the smart part: it turns one collaboration into two separate moments, the kind of release structure that keeps collectors checking back instead of moving on.

Tarmac Works is a Hong Kong-based brand founded in 2014, and it has made its name on premium 1:64 scale model cars. That matters here because Wotherspoon is not being slotted into a generic toy-car collab. His color-blocking, already made famous through his 2018 Nike Air Max 1/97, translates cleanly into automotive form, where bold panels and graphic contrast read like custom bodywork instead of branding fluff. Wotherspoon previously did a Porsche Taycan art car, and that history gives this project a real through-line rather than a one-off novelty.

Felix Kwong, Tarmac Works’ founder and creative lead, said he had followed Wotherspoon’s work for years, pointing to the Porsche collaborations and the Air Max 1/97 as the design references that hooked him. That is the appeal in plain English: this collab is not just for model-car obsessives. It pulls from sneaker culture, art-car aesthetics, and the kind of trading-card nostalgia that has already turned anything collectible into a mini economy.

Wotherspoon said Beijing was the right place because many major collectors are based there, and that choice lines up with the scale of Hobby Expo China, which is listed for April 17 to 19 in Beijing and described as a major model expo drawing hundreds of brands and tens of thousands of attendees. In a market where the same audience chases shoes, blind-box toys, and cast-metal grails, this drop lands exactly where attention lives.