I nspired by and reflecting on a contemporary society overwhelmed by an excess of images, advertisements, and cartoons, KAWS has emerged as a leading figure in a new iteration of Pop sensibility for the 21st century. CHUM exemplifies the artist’s striking visual language and bold embrace of styles and imagery associated with Pop Art. After studying illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York, KAWS began using the tag "KAWS" as a young graffiti artist in Jersey City, establishing a bold and iconic practice that would go on to shape much of his artistic career. In the early 1990s, KAWS started to parody and subvert corporate and political advertisements, often on bus shelters and billboards. As his practice expanded beyond graffiti, KAWS began appropriating recognizable cartoon characters from popular culture, creating his own cast of characters, one of the most iconic of which is CHUM.
Extending the art historical tradition of reappropriating images by such critical Pop artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, KAWS’s figures’ often feature unsettling or jarring elements, such as the signature cross-eyed motif seen in CHUM. It is through these figure heads that KAWS has established himself as a creative entrepreneur akin to Warhol and Takashi Murakami, infiltrating the realm of mass consumerism with his limited-edition figurines and streetwear collaborations. His influences, including artists like Keith Haring, whose Pop Shop was reinterpreted by KAWS for his OriginalFake store, are clear, yet KAWS’s careful craftsmanship, which merges high design with the aesthetics of street art, gives his work a unique character.
Foregoing art’s traditional anti-commercial idealism, CHUM epitomises the artist’s playful and dynamic examination of mainstream visual culture. The cartoon subject, which bears a resemblance to the iconic Michelin Man, is marked with KAWS’s signature ‘X’ eyes, which originate from KAWS’s time tagging branded posters throughout New York City. Demonstrating KAWS’s meticulous handling of paint, the controlled lines and fluidity of colour seen in the present work imbue the rounded CHUM figure with a sense of movement, as if he were striding toward the viewer from the wall. The smooth, uniform plane of pale blue rendered in a deep matte shade is cut through by KAWS’s determined lines of indigo, further exaggerating the figure despite the muted palette. The exaggerated masculinity of the figure, as the artist describes, allows the viewer to “compare body postures and assertiveness–or lack of it–in front of a CHUM… we are using it as an excuse to see ourselves...If, for the Pop artists of the 1960s, the premise was, 'You are what you buy,' for KAWS it would be, 'You are what you see.'"(Mónica Ramírez-Montagut,, "KAWS: SEEING YOU SEEING YOURSELF," In Ian Luna and Lauren A. Gould, eds. KAWS, New York 2010, p.133). In infiltrating the worlds of mass consumerism and popular culture, KAWS’s work constitutes a new paradigm in art history in which his work functions less as a commentary on consumer culture, but as a continuous enactment of the complex role of art and popular media in everyday lives within capitalist culture.
