At first, I didn’t understand the why of it all. The figures, the Simpsons, breakfast cereal, Snoopy—it felt like I had walked into the fever dream of a Toys“R”Us aisle, reassembled by a philosopher who got lost in a skateboard shop. FAMILY greeted me at the entrance like a silent sentinel—solemn, towering, unmistakably mournful—but inside the exhibit, the emotional register was more chaotic, more playful, and often outright absurd.
The exhibition was a mash-up of references so layered it became hard to tell whether I was inside a cultural critique or a celebration. KAWS takes the language of pop culture and loops it until it begins to speak back, distorted and melancholic. Brian Donnelly—KAWS’s given name—is a product of both formal art training and the graffiti subculture of the 1990s. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, he started his career as an animation freelancer for Disney, working on films like 101 Dalmatians and Doug. But it was in the streets that he found his true medium—not through vandalism for its own sake, but by hijacking advertisements. Literally. He would remove bus stop posters, paint over them with his now-iconic "Companion" character, and re-install them before anyone noticed. That spirit of intervention still runs through his work today.
But why use cartoon figures? Why melt down childhood imagery into monumental sculptures or serial silkscreens? KAWS once said, “I just try to create the kind of work that I want to see. And that’s always been work that’s very immediate and very graphic.” There’s a kind of honesty in that simplicity. His pieces are accessible, even when they confuse. You don’t need an art history degree to feel something when you’re standing beneath the enormous, slumped shoulders of a grieving cartoon father.
And yet, for all their flatness, these characters carry emotional heft. The "X" eyes—once a nod to cartoon shorthand for death—now read as a marker of detachment, of characters who’ve become too saturated by commercial life to feel anything at all. There’s an alienation here that mirrors the modern condition: recognizable forms made unfamiliar, sentimental shapes hollowed out and oversized.
I wandered the exhibit in a kind of visual vertigo. At times it felt shallow, like aesthetic sugar—bright, nostalgic, and aggressively consumable. But then I’d turn a corner and catch the angle of a sculpture’s body language, the slope of a shoulder, the downward tilt of a head—and the emotional complexity would return. As KAWS put it in another interview, “You can see a sculpture and it may have these cartoon characteristics, but it can still have a sense of mourning or humor or anger.” His figures may be mute, but they’re emotionally articulate.
By the end, I wasn’t entirely won over—but I was disarmed. I had a greater appreciation for the vision and its execution. KAWS isn’t offering a definitive message. He’s not lecturing. He’s remixing—our icons, our memories, our commodified childhoods—and asking us to sit with the strange aftertaste. Somewhere between sincerity and satire, I began to feel something. Not revelation, but recognition.