Beyond the Walls: Kenny Scharf’s Emotional Show at MAM Shanghai

At The Modern Art Museum (MAM) in Shanghai, Kenny Scharf’s largest solo exhibition to date is on view through October 8. Curated by Shai Baitel and entitled “EMOTIONAL,” the presentation spans several series from the artist’s career, providing an expansive look at his playful visual language—a recognizable reality he’s conjured through expressing his emotions with color, characters, and Pop art fantasy. 

Seen across three floors are more than 120 works, including several new pieces, as well as Kenny Scharf’s Beach Club—an installation across an entire floor, transforming the space into a West Coast adventure, inspired by Scharf’s connection to his home in California. Complete with real sand, palm trees, beach huts, lounge chairs, and more, the activation will host public beach parties with a curated lineup of DJs each weekend.

Timed to the exhibition, Whitewall spoke with Scharf about how how his early New York days influenced his iconic creative style, how views expressing his emotions and communicating with emojis, and what’s next.

Kenny Scharf’s “EMOTIONAL” at MAM

WHITEWALL: Your exhibition “EMOTIONAL” at MAM spans five decades of your practice. How did you approach selecting works that capture the range of your career? How did you think about your emotions from these decades?

KENNY SCHARF: I let the curator Shai Baitel choose the works. It is not supposed to reflect the range of my career more of a specific range connected to emotions. As the skeleton framework of the show, Shai approached my body of work using six main emotions scientifically defined by psychologist Paul Ekman in the ‘60s. I try not to think too much about my emotions; I just let them express themselves when necessary.

” I try not to think too much about my emotions.”

—Kenny Scharf

WW: Color and playfulness are central to your visual language. Did this reflect your emotional state when you began your artistic practice? What emotions did you hope to evoke in viewers with “EMOTIONAL” today?

KS: My earliest visual language was full of color, with the fake bright plastic aesthetic of the late ’50s and early ’60s; fantasy-filled industrial design that was predominant in Southern California of my childhood. As I approached my teenage years, my aesthetic continued, but there was always a tinge of the dark underpinnings of society lurking somewhere, which has been one of my main themes throughout my career—creating drama in the fantasy setting. I don’t like to dictate a viewer’s reaction, especially when it comes to emotions. I want the viewer’s own emotions to be the reaction.

“Creating drama in the fantasy setting…”

—Kenny Scharf

Kenny Scharf’s First Major Show in China

Kenny Scharf, “EMOTIONAL” at MAM, photo by Clara Melchiorre.

WW: This is your first major solo exhibition in China. What does it mean for you to share your work with an audience in Shanghai? Did that influence the way you framed the exhibition?

⁠KS: I am thrilled to share my work with the amazing Shanghai audience. I got to experience their reaction throughout the process, and I loved the enthusiasm and the pertinent questions. It did not influence it as Shai Baitel framed the exhibition, yet I think this idea of emojis as methods of communication—and how it relates to my work before the Internet—is something that the Chinese audience can definitely identify with.

WW: Your characters—from ecstatic to dystopian—have always facilitated larger cultural commentary. How do they function in this exhibition’s context?

KS: As an Earth citizen, I am affected by the current cultural influence and my influence on the culture itself. I hope the exhibition can convey this.

Breaking Boundaries, Staying Free

WW: The show includes both paintings and installations. How important is it for you to break the boundary between viewer and artwork?

⁠KS: My entire life in living, as well as art making, is about breaking boundaries. Give me a line and I’ll cross it. It’s important to be given boundaries sometimes—it can create a sense of security—but I always find a way to break through the boundaries. It’s so much more exciting! Creating a stage within to focus yet to break free is to be truly free which is what art is all about! The idea of bringing the viewer into an environment as opposed to an object in the wall is just physicality. Anyone can enter a painting if they truly want but an installation is definitely a way to bring the viewer literally inside.

“I always find a way to break through the boundaries.”

—Kenny Scharf

WW: Themes of environmentalism, pop culture, and space-age optimism often collide in your work. How are those tensions playing out in “EMOTIONAL”?

KS: ⁠I feel they are represented in many ways, but very distinctly, you can find it in MAM Shanghai’s Kenny Scharf Beach Club, conceived by Shai Baitel. As you enter this fantasy filled escape of tiki gods, pink sand, palms, and the river Huangpu, your eye will probably look up and see multitudes of plastic children’s cars and trucks and other discarded toys installed in a grid like pattern in what looks like dangling vines that are actually made of plastic refuse mostly from my daily consumption and plastic refuse I discover in my daily activities over months.

I string them together like beads in something I call “Garland,” which is exactly what garland is—a decorated string only this is actually decorative plastic trash, not tinsel. You might find some actual tinsel as well, as it too is garbage that I collected. The fact that we’re drowning in plastic from micro plastics in our air, to fouling our beautiful coastlines in every corner of the Earth, this to the inquisitive viewer should be a reality check to the complete fantasy of the beach club as we’re enjoying the beach, the global petroleum industry is killing us.

Early Inspiration in the East Village

WW: Looking back on your early days in New York’s East Village art scene, how do you think your approach to making work has changed? Remained the same?

⁠KS: My process and my education took place in a strong way during my time living in the East Village of the late 1970s and 1980s. I created my very current approach to art making during those times, heavily influenced by my peers, which involved the streets. This is when I began my practice of garbage collecting into art, and my practice of spray painting and sharing my work in a very public way—by joining the amazing visual discourse in the streets. The spontaneity needed to paint a painting literally on the run, with the danger of being caught and physically harmed, is a great way to exercise a certain part of the brain that is exciting and never predictable.

WW: What’s next?

KS: I’m having an opening at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels on September 4. I’m also making a giant mural, Kranzbergville, in St. Louis this fall at the Walls Off Washington with the Kranzberg Arts Foundation.