[2025. 10. 10]Basquiat’s kingdom of crowns and chaos unleashed in Seoul

Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat / Courtesy of Lizzie Himmel

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.” At 21, Basquiat was the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the influential Documenta in Kassel, Germany. In New York, he moved through the art world’s glittering circles and feverish parties alongside Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, while his canvases filled the city’s most coveted galleries. Then, at 27, his meteoric ascent ended in a heroin overdose.

A view of the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition, “Signs: Connecting Past and Future,” at Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown)” (1983) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

In his brief yet incandescent career, Basquiat left behind an explosive body of some 3,000 paintings and drawings. Four decades on, his art still pulses with life as one of the defining faces of contemporary expression. In 2017, his 1982 “Untitled” sold for a record-shattering $110.5 million, the highest price ever paid for a work by an American artist — let alone an African-American artist — at the time.

The enduring aura that surrounds the painter, coupled with the staggering sums required to assemble his original works under one roof, is what makes every Basquiat exhibition a big deal.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Untitled (Chinese Man, Orange)” (1981), left, and “2 1/2 Hours of Chinese Food” (1984) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Untitled” (1986) / Courtesy of Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat’s world decoded

As its title suggests, the show turns its gaze toward the dense constellation of signs and symbols that Basquiat conjured up across his untamed canvases. His inspirations were boundless: jazz and early hip-hop, anatomy, boxing and baseball, comics, capitalism, African-American history and Caribbean folklore, all interwoven in an improvisational rhythm.

Crowns, skulls, masks, diagrams and word fragments recur throughout his oeuvre, forming a visual language through which he wrestled with questions of identity and power.

The crown became his emblem of self-sovereignty, a gesture of elevating Black figures who had long been denied dignity or recognition. The skulls and anatomical studies traced the line between life and death, beauty and decay. And his haphazardly placed words, which rarely formed full sentences, visually represented his stream of consciousness, alive with cultural memory and existential unease.

“Untitled (Fun Fridge)” (1982), left, and “Vase” (1982), created by Jean-Michel Basquiat in collaboration with Keith Haring et al. / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Joy” (1984), left, and “Untitled” (1985) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Visitors can encounter the lexicon of Basquiat’s world in myriad forms inside the gallery. Among them is “Untitled (Fun Fridge),” where a refrigerator becomes his impromptu canvas; “Untitled” (Car Crash),” a loose fabric painting that revisits the near-fatal accident he suffered at age 7; and a series of his fierce “warriors” and self-portraits.

“Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown),” viscerally captures the tension between creativity and his commodified status in the art world, while “Masonic Lodge” and “Emblem” literally hide cryptic phrases and layered symbols beneath their colored surfaces. 

The multipanel “Flesh and Spirit,” one of the artist’s largest pieces, exposes the dialogue between body and belief — between the Western, anatomical view of the human form and the spiritual cosmologies drawn from African and Caribbean traditions. And “Exu,” created in the year of his death, almost presciently invokes the Afro-Caribbean deity who guards thecrossroads between worlds.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Emblem” (1984) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “New York, New York” (1981) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Also sprinkled throughout the exhibition are objects of Korean cultural heritage: paper rubbings of the 7,000-year-old Bangudae petroglyphs from Ulsan, the Haerye edition of “Hunminjeongeum,” which details the founding principles of the Korean alphabet, Hangeul; and Nam June Paik’s iconic TV robot.

Their presence feels jarring, even incongruous, in relation to Basquiat’s world. Yet this unlikely juxtaposition hardly diminishes the overall experience. It may even prompt viewers to attempt to make sense of this collision of cultures on their own terms.

“Signs: Connecting Past and Future” runs through Jan. 31, 2026, at DDP.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Exu” (1988) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

By Park Han-sol

The Korea Times

Oct 10, 2025