“Public art is a very simple idea—art you can share with everyone. If you think something is beautiful, you should want more people to see it”
But none of these duets were as ambitious as Kaws: Holiday, a 28-metre-long floating installation that Kaws and Lam first launched on Sokcheon Lake in Seoul, South Korea. By Kaws’ own account, the logistics behind a work of that scale were “crazy”. Hidden beneath the surface of the water was a 40-tonne steel structure that continuously pumped air into the inflatable, so that the sculpture always appeared to have a smooth, seamless surface. Then there were countless challenges involving the weather, moving such a huge and heavy object, and even the threat of sabotage by unimpressed visitors (just think of the fate that was to come for Maurizio Cattelan’s poor banana). Lam knew the project would be difficult, but he wasn’t deterred. “When I first saw [Kaws’ plans for the sculpture], I thought, ‘Let’s do it’,” says Lam. “I wasn’t just excited to work on another project together, I understood it was something he wanted to do differently, to have another challenge.”
Lam says Kaws wanted to debut the work in Asia, where he is particularly popular. His auction record was set in Hong Kong last year when his painting The Kaws Album sold for US$14.8 million, and he has held popular exhibitions in China and Japan. Asian collectors’ interest in Kaws’ work and artist-designed toys more generally can be attributed to the region’s history: Hong Kong was historically a toy manufacturing hub, and Hong Kong artist Michael Lau kickstarted the craze for artist-designed vinyl toys in the 1990s. Collectible toys have long been popular with children around the continent, as well, so artist-designed figurines evoke a sense of nostalgia in collectors. “Kaws is so popular in Hong Kong, so popular in Japan,” says Lam. “But we decided to launch it in Korea because he’d just had an exhibition there and the response was good, but the audience in Korea was still more fresh. It was great to introduce his work to a new audience.”
Collectively, millions of people around the world have visited Arr-produced public art exhibitions—