KAWS and the Companion, How a Vinyl Toy Took Over Art

On April 1, 2019, a 2005 canvas by KAWS went under the hammer at Sotheby's in Hong Kong. When bidding stopped, The KAWS Album had sold for HK$115.9 million, roughly $14.7 million, a record for the artist at the time.

The week before, a 37 meter inflatable version of his best-known character had been lying on its back in Victoria Harbour. Twenty years before that, the same character had been a small vinyl toy produced by Bounty Hunter in Japan. KAWS has always worked on all three scales at once, and that is the whole story.

Bus shelters and backgrounds

KAWS is Brian Donnelly, born on November 4, 1974, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He started as a graffiti writer, then studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York, graduating with a BFA in 1996. After school he freelanced for Jumbo Pictures, painting backgrounds for the animated series 101 Dalmatians, Daria and Doug.

At night he worked on a different kind of image. Through the 1990s he opened up advertising displays on billboards, bus shelters and phone booths, using a skeleton key given to him by the artist Barry McGee, and painted his own characters over the ads before closing them back up. The ads stayed. They just acquired company. It was a sharp joke about who owns the street, and it got him noticed.

The Companion arrives

In 1999 he created Companion, a cartoon figure with a skull and crossbones head and X-ed out eyes. That year the Japanese company Bounty Hunter produced the first vinyl Companion in black, brown and grey, and Christie's records the edition as 500 of each colorway.

Japan was the right place for it. Tokyo's streetwear shops already understood the appeal of a small, limited object, a culture covered in our Ura-Harajuku guide, and designer toys fitted in next to T-shirts and sneakers. In 2006 KAWS opened OriginalFake with Medicom Toy, a store and label in Aoyama, Tokyo, which ran until May 2013.

The editions kept coming and kept getting bigger. A grey Five Years Later Companion arrived in 2004 in an edition of 500. A Four Foot Companion followed in 2007, about 127 centimeters tall, in editions of 100 per color. Star Wars versions followed, a Stormtrooper Companion in 2008 and a Boba Fett in 2013, and the Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama gave one a reflective silver skin. Each release was a small, scarce drop, and the logic matched what Supreme was doing with clothing across the Pacific.

Everywhere at once

By the 2010s Companion had escaped the shelf. In 2012 it flew as a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. That same year the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth acquired the sculpture Where the End Starts.

Fashion followed. Uniqlo's relationship with KAWS began in 2016 with a Sesame Street line, then a Peanuts line in April 2017 and a second Sesame Street line in November 2018. The collaboration released on June 3, 2019, became a news story of its own. Online stock reportedly sold out in seconds in China, videos on Weibo showed shoppers crawling under security gates and pulling down displays, and a 99 yuan T-shirt reappeared on Taobao for close to 400 yuan, according to sina.com.cn. Few things illustrate the economics of resale more neatly.

At the other end of the market, Kim Jones staged his first Dior men's show in June 2018 around a 10 meter tall version of KAWS's BFF character, built from roughly 70,000 flowers according to Dior. It was the same luxury and street crossover that Virgil Abloh was pushing at Louis Vuitton that same week.

Floating, then hanging

KAWS:HOLIDAY took the idea outdoors. After stops in Seoul and Taipei, the 37 meter Companion lay on its back in Victoria Harbour from March 22 to 31, 2019, part of Hong Kong Arts Month. The day after the run ended, the Sotheby's sale made the headlines.

Museums caught up. The Brooklyn Museum staged KAWS: WHAT PARTY from February 26 to September 5, 2021, a survey of 25 years of work covering drawings, paintings, sculpture, furniture, product and fashion collaborations, public projects and augmented reality pieces, organized around five themes. The Brooklyn Museum's exhibition page still lists the show. In October 2021 Fortnite added a KAWS Skeleton outfit, which put the work in front of an audience that may never set foot in a gallery.

High, low and the same figure

It is easy to be snobbish about an artist whose work hangs in museums and on Uniqlo hangers. It misses the point, which is that he never chose. The same figure appears on a mass-market T-shirt, a limited vinyl toy and a canvas that sells for millions, and none of those versions apologizes for the others.

For more on where art meets streetwear, explore our art and collaborations hubs, or the rest of our culture section.

The first Companions from 1999 came in three colors only. Black, brown and grey, five hundred apiece, made with Bounty Hunter in Japan.