Basquiat’s kingdom of crowns and chaos unleashed in Seoul

It’s impossible to separate the fervent, graffiti-charged art of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) from the rawness of his own blazing life. His searing visual language has arrived in Seoul in an exhibition titled “Signs: Connecting Past and Future” at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), curated by art historians Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer. The show brings together more than 70 paintings and drawings from private and institutional collections, along with 155 pages from the artist’s notebooks — filled with sketches, poetry fragments and wordplay — unveiled for the first time in Korea. Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat was not raised in poverty, but at 17, after being kicked out of his house for dropping out of school, he began a restless new existence on the streets of Manhattan. He spray-painted cryptic messages across walls, slept in cheap hotels and drifted from one friend’s couch to another. In 1980, he was selling drawings for $50 apiece. Within a few years, that same young rebel became the living definition of an “art star.Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times