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A MagicLab presenter introduces Yicang Art Museum and its Kenny Scharf exhibition, tracing how the artist explores emotion, shared experience, and discarded materials.
In this talk
- 0:04
Yicang Art Museum and the exhibition
Yicang occupies a former 1980s coal depot on Shanghai’s Huangpu River. The museum retained the site’s industrial layout while turning it into an art venue. Its Kenny Scharf exhibition brings together over a hundred works made across five decades.
- 1:19
Emotion and the Blob series
The exhibition treats emotion as essential to survival, communication, and social connection. Scharf’s Blob figures, developed over decades and influenced by Surrealists Yves Tanguy and Hans Arp, turn imagined forms into seemingly three-dimensional creatures. He also uses the blobs to consider how different people coexist in one society.
- 2:46
Six emotions across Scharf’s work
The exhibition groups works into six color-coded spaces tied to psychologist Paul Ekman’s basic expressions: anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, awe, and fear. Ekman argued that these emotions have biological roots and appear across cultures. Each space moves from Scharf’s early work toward his Emotional Faces series, made around 2020.
- 4:14
New York roots and a beach club
The exhibition revisits Scharf’s early years in New York, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and formed connections with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. A beach-club installation draws on Venice Beach and Scharf’s swimming habit. It turns everyday plastic and beach litter into sculptural works, reflecting his interest in how discarded objects can take on new life.
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