At DDP Museum Exhibition Hall 1, a large-scale retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat,《JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: Signs: Connecting Past and Future》, is currently on view.
 
Representatives of the Basquiat estate participated in shaping the exhibition’s direction, and the co-curatorial team—Jiyoon Lee (Founder of SUUM PROJECT; Artistic Director and Curator), alongside the internationally recognized Basquiat specialists Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer—designed its structure and narrative together. The presentation brings to Seoul roughly 230 items in total, including major paintings reportedly insured at around KRW 1.4 trillion, some 70 paintings and drawings, and approximately 160 pages of archival material excerpted from eight notebooks.
 
Its scale and numbers drew attention even before opening, but what the exhibition ultimately puts on the table is not a matter of magnitude. It asks viewers not simply what to see, but how to read. And that “reading” begins with the surface itself—with the marks left behind and the rhythm of what has been worked over.

When you stand before the work, what registers first is not polish but roughness that feels deliberately retained. In place of refined brushwork or a stable composition, the canvas is governed by repetition and friction—by traces of erasure. Smeared oilstick, lines that seem scratched into being, and words and symbols returned to with insistence crowd the pictorial space.
 
The surface reads less as impulsive release than as a calculated attempt to translate the noise, tension, and imbalance of 1980s New York into painterly terms. Basquiat’s canvas is not so much an outpouring of feeling as a weave in which disparate signs collide and overlap.
 
The exhibition begins precisely here, with a question that is both historical and formal: why would an artist in the 1980s choose, instead of a “beautiful image,” to leave jagged, incomplete text and symbols on a canvas?
 
 

1. Historical Context: Why Did “Language” Enter the Canvas?

New York in the 1980s—the city in which Basquiat worked—stood at a significant cultural and intellectual turning point. If the previous generation of Abstract Expressionism emphasized the materiality of paint, physical gesture, and the artist’s interior life while keeping literary elements at a distance, Basquiat’s generation moved with a different set of pressures. In this period, text and sign increasingly functioned as key instruments for understanding the world.
 
In the humanities, semiotics, structuralism, and deconstruction—associated most visibly with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida—shifted attention from what an image represents to how meaning is produced. Meaning was understood not as fixed but as unstable, sliding, and continually open to re-reading, and that sensibility seeped into visual culture at large.
 
This theoretical turn did not remain inside academia. Hip-hop culture and graffiti, formed in the Bronx in the 1970s, pulled words and sentences onto the street’s surface, making text physical and visible. A sentence became something read and seen at once; tags, scrawls, and rhythm fused with the city’s pulse to form a visual vernacular. Whether or not Basquiat systematically studied theory, the New York he inhabited was already an environment acutely responsive to text and symbols.

Parallel currents were already unfolding within art. Conceptual practices in the 1960s and 70s shifted attention away from the craft of making and toward the conditions under which meaning takes shape. Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) demonstrated how an object, an image, and a definition operate on different planes, making clear that visual art could no longer be confined to form alone. Lawrence Weiner likewise presented the sentence itself as the work, asserting that language can hold sculptural force.

Meanwhile, Cy Twombly had, since the 1950s and 60s, drawn scribble, handwriting, and fragmentary phrases into painting, blurring the line between writing and drawing. In his work, language functions—before it delivers meaning—as trace and rhythm. These trajectories helped form the aesthetic ground from which Basquiat could later emerge.
 
Ultimately, the entry of language into Basquiat’s canvas was not accidental; it was the result of an era in which the border between ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’ was dissolving—an intersection of historical conditions, street culture, and the legacy of conceptual art. His painting was what emerged when those currents met.



2. Notebooks: Crushed Oilstick and Edited Information

A key component of this show is the set of eight notebooks—roughly 160 pages of documents—presented here as essential material for understanding Basquiat’s point of departure. These notebooks are not simply a bundle of doodles; they resemble a private archive built through repeated collecting, arranging, and accumulating of words, names, sentences, and signs. They reveal him not as an artist who produced images purely on emotional impulse, but as someone with an editor’s mind—gathering, sorting, and cutting information as part of his preparation.

The pages repeatedly surface biblical quotations, anatomical terms, Black historical figures, the names of athletes and musicians, lists of words, and shards of sentences. These elements reappear later in paintings and drawings, rearranged in new contexts. The notebooks function not merely as memo pads but as reservoirs of language—workspaces where words are stored, tested, and kept in motion before they migrate into painting.
 
That layered record becomes material trace on the canvas. The crushed oilstick marks and overpainted letters visible in the large works on view are the result of notebook language translated into painterly action. Basquiat wrote words, struck through them, and covered them again—over and over.
 
As his remark suggests—“I cross out words so you will see them more”—this erasure is not deletion but insistence. Scratches and remnants seize the gaze and keep meaning suspended, refusing final settlement. In that process, painting becomes less a vehicle for delivering a message than a place where text and image are generated, interrupted, and forced into collision.


 
3. Colliding Symbols: Dissecting Institutions and Capital
 
Included in the exhibition, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) condenses the way text and symbols can operate as social critique. The repeated phrase “Museum Security” exceeds a job title; it points to the constrained position Black people were often allowed to occupy within the American art institution of the 1980s.

The downtown art world centered around SoHo was governed by entrenched white power structures, and Black individuals were frequently recognized not as artists but as guards or service workers. Basquiat became an exceptional success, yet he was also consumed through the romantic image of a “street genius,” turned into a spectacle. He faced suspicion even at openings, and could become a target of surveillance in the very spaces where his work hung.
 
Phrases such as “Esso” and “Priceless Art” register a cold awareness of how art circulates under the logic of capital. The crown—repeated throughout his work—is less a boast than a symbolic sovereignty claimed by one who has been excluded. By placing the crown beside commodity signs, Basquiat compresses into a single image the contradictions knotted between art, power, and money.
 

 
4. Gathering the Fragments: The Aesthetics of a Collection

Another point that sets this retrospective apart is “the diversity of its sources”. Rather than relying on the holdings of a single museum, it brings together works from private collections around the world, revealing multiple faces of Basquiat that resist being organized into one stable account. Works collected across different contexts and tastes meet in the space of DDP, making evident—without forcing the point—that his practice cannot be reduced to a single style or narrative.
 
This configuration encourages viewers to approach him not as a fixed figure within a particular lineage, but through a wider lens: the ways signs and language operate visually.
 
Notably, the exhibition places Basquiat’s works in limited proximity to the Hunminjeongeum Haerye (the explanatory text for the Korean alphabet), rubbings of the Bangudae Petroglyphs in Ulsan, and Nam June Paik’s TV-robot works. Rather than drawing lines of influence, this functions more as a prompt to recognize, side by side, how letters, symbols, and technology have acted as visual language across different eras and media. The visitor is not compelled to decode; instead, the display gently widens attention to the many ways signs have shaped human thought and expression.



Closing: Questioning the Signs of Our Time

Basquiat’s status is not the kind that neatly overlays popular symbolism and art-historical achievement at equal weight. His work sharply captured the sensibility of its image culture, leaving a powerful imprint through the fusion of text and image. Yet today, the evaluation surrounding his name is often shaped in advance by the language of the market and the stories of circulation, before sustained looking has a chance to arrive.
 
Price, scarcity, a mythologized biography, and endlessly repeated images can operate like a ready-made framework, producing a symbolic excess that outgrows the work’s actual achievement. At that point, Basquiat functions less as an artist than as an icon consumed by contemporary culture.
 
This does not mean his work is light or superficial. Rather, the role he played in art history is less a singular “turning point” that single-handedly produced a rupture than a concentrated instance in which already-formed currents—conceptual art, text-based practice, graffiti culture, and the circulation of mass imagery—crossed and intensified. Put differently, he did not invent an entirely new language; he made unusually visible, with exceptional clarity, the clash of visual and cultural languages already scattered across his time.
 
For this reason, responses to Basquiat often come with built-in tension. Popular fascination, institutional endorsement, and speculative fever can make the work feel “already known,” leaving it vulnerable to consumption without critical distance. Seen this way, Basquiat is less a “great exception” than a case that condenses the conditions under which late twentieth-century image culture operated.
 
Within such conditions of consumption and circulation, just as Basquiat built an identity in 1980s New York through his own system of signs, we, too, need to look back at the symbols and markers in which we live. When we recall that his work was not simply personal expression but the result of a continuous awareness of his position within the era’s structures of language, power, and images, the question becomes not a passing impression but a stance.
 
What is “the crown” for us now, and what is the “copyright (©)” that invisibly defines—or controls—us? The landscape of today, where social media metrics, algorithms, and the logic of capital set the terms of what feels legible and desirable, resembles—strikingly—the cultural conditions Basquiat faced in the 1980s. Only now, signs circulate faster, grow more intricate, and harden into the measures by which perception and judgment are calibrated.

Therefore, in this exhibition, rather than consuming Basquiat through the myth built around his image, we should attend closely to his way of working—the fierce discipline of speaking, striking through, erasing, repeating, and testing meaning. His paintings do not deliver a sealed statement; they show, plainly, how image and language clash, slip, and generate sense in motion. The encounter, then, is not a backward-looking retrospective so much as a question that still presses on the present.

Just as Basquiat fought the given order on the canvas, we are led to ask how the marks of algorithms and capital—encountered daily—shape the contours of our thinking. In the end, Basquiat’s traces can prompt each of us, from where we stand, to refine how we read such marks—and to consider how we might write them anew.

 
Exhibition Information

Exhibition: JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: Signs: Connecting Past and Future
Venue: DDP (Dongdaemun Design Plaza), Museum Exhibition Hall 1
Dates: 2025.09.23 – 2026.01.31

Kim Heejo is an artist working across painting and sculpture, approaching form as a *schematic medium* grounded in systems-based thinking. Shaped by long-term practice in New York and ongoing work in Seoul, her work emphasizes structural logics and generative processes over fixed imagery. In this article, she presents an artist-led reading of a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition.

www.heejokim.com   |   @in.station