KAWS: Where the End Starts was a major retrospective by KAWS (Brian Donnelly, b. 1974, Jersey City NJ) held at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai from March 28 to August 13, 2017. Featuring more than 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and the monumental BIG SLEEP centerpiece, it was the artist's first large-scale museum survey in mainland China and a defining moment in his Asian-market positioning.
Why the Yuz Museum Show Mattered
By 2017, KAWS had already cleared the gatekeepers of the Western contemporary art world. His Companion sculptures sat in front of the Standard Hotel in New York. His prints moved through Phillips and Sotheby's day sales. His Uniqlo collaborations had introduced his graphic vocabulary to tens of millions of consumers globally. What he had not yet done — at institutional scale — was plant a flag inside China, the single largest contemporary art buying market in the world.
The Yuz Museum, founded by Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek inside a former aircraft hangar in Shanghai's West Bund cultural district, was the right venue at the right moment. The West Bund had become China's answer to Chelsea or Mayfair, anchored by the Long Museum, the Yuz, and a growing roster of international gallery satellites. Staging a retrospective there signaled, unambiguously, that KAWS was being positioned as an Asian-market priority artist — not a Western import marketed to Asia, but an artist who belonged on the same walls as the museum's roster of Anselm Kiefer, Maurizio Cattelan, and Zhang Huan.
What Was on View
The exhibition brought together work spanning two decades of KAWS' practice. It was an unusually complete survey for a living artist in his early forties.
The BIG SLEEP Centerpiece
The emotional and visual anchor of the show was BIG SLEEP, a monumental reclining Companion sculpture rendered in a slumped, head-in-hands posture that has since become one of the most recognized poses in KAWS' vocabulary. Installed in the cavernous main hall of the Yuz, BIG SLEEP read as both intimate and architectural — a figure scaled to swallow the viewer while still reading as a single, vulnerable character. The work became the de facto identity image of the exhibition and seeded the Companion-in-repose motif that KAWS would later iterate across HOLIDAY inflatables and editions.
Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper
Beyond BIG SLEEP, the show included large-scale acrylic-on-canvas paintings featuring KAWS' appropriated cast of CHUM, BFF, Accomplice, and Companion characters; bronze and fiberglass sculptures across multiple scales; and a substantial selection of drawings and sketches that traced his thinking from graffiti through Disney-system character appropriation into formal painting. For collectors, the sketches were arguably the most important inclusion — they demonstrated the rigor behind the brand and provided a direct line from the 1990s SoHo phone-booth interventions to museum-grade canvases.
Exhibition at a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | KAWS: Where the End Starts |
| Venue | Yuz Museum, West Bund, Shanghai |
| Dates | March 28 to August 13, 2017 |
| Works Shown | 150+ paintings, sculptures, drawings |
| Centerpiece | BIG SLEEP monumental Companion sculpture |
| Artist Age at Opening | 42 |
| Strategic Significance | First major mainland China museum retrospective |
| Originating Survey | Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Oct 2016 to Jan 2017) |
The Shanghai Market Thesis
Why does an exhibition that closed nearly a decade ago still matter to today's collectors? Because it set the terms for everything that followed.
Activating the Chinese Collector Base
The Yuz show landed in front of an audience that had been quietly absorbing KAWS through fashion collaborations, AllRightsReserved Hong Kong releases, and the early HOLIDAY inflatable cycle. The retrospective gave those buyers permission to reframe their consumer relationship with the artist as a collector relationship. Within roughly two years of the closing date, mainland and Hong Kong bidders had become the dominant force in KAWS auction results.
The Sotheby's Hong Kong Record
In April 2019, less than two years after Where the End Starts closed, KAWS' painting THE KAWS ALBUM sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong for approximately USD 14.7 million — roughly fifteen times its high estimate and a record that recalibrated the entire market for his work. That sale did not happen in a vacuum. It happened on top of the institutional credibility, regional recognition, and collector relationships that the Yuz retrospective had been instrumental in building.
Knock-On Effects in the Secondary Market
The Gauntlet Gallery 160,000+ comparable sales database shows the post-2017 acceleration clearly. Across the documented secondary market, screenprints and signed editions from the OriginalFake era and key Companion releases moved from modest four-figure ranges into consistent five-figure territory in the years following the Shanghai exhibition, with peak-period results pushing into six figures for trophy editions. The HOLIDAY inflatable series, which KAWS launched at scale through AllRightsReserved across Asian cities beginning in 2018, would likely not have achieved its cultural and commercial intensity without the institutional groundwork laid at the Yuz.
How Where the End Starts Fits the Broader Tour
Where the End Starts was conceived as a traveling survey. It opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in October 2016 before reformatting for Shanghai. The Shanghai iteration was larger, denser, and explicitly tuned to an Asian audience, with the BIG SLEEP centerpiece given the architectural scale the Yuz's hangar interior allowed. The tour was followed by KAWS' increasingly ambitious museum program through the late 2010s and 2020s, culminating in the Brooklyn Museum retrospective KAWS: WHAT PARTY in 2021 and the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition KAWS: FAMILY in 2022.
What This Means for Collectors Today
The Shanghai retrospective is now treated by serious KAWS collectors as a provenance and reference event. Works that were exhibited, illustrated in the catalogue, or directly related to the show — sketches, editions tied to the BIG SLEEP motif, OriginalFake-era pieces that fall within the retrospective's chronological scope — carry a documented exhibition history that meaningfully supports valuation. For buyers building a long-term KAWS position, prioritizing pieces with verifiable ties to the institutional record from 2017 onward is one of the cleanest ways to compound provenance.
For deeper guidance on edition rarity, authentication standards, and market tiers, see our KAWS Collector Guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the KAWS Yuz Museum Shanghai exhibition?
KAWS: Where the End Starts ran at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai from March 28 to August 13, 2017.
How many works were in the Yuz Museum KAWS retrospective?
The exhibition featured more than 150 works including paintings, sculptures, and drawings spanning roughly two decades of KAWS' practice.
What was the BIG SLEEP sculpture?
BIG SLEEP was the monumental reclining Companion sculpture installed as the centerpiece of the Yuz Museum exhibition, depicting a slumped figure with head in hands at architectural scale.
Why was the Shanghai exhibition strategically important?
It was the artist's first major mainland China museum retrospective, positioning KAWS inside the Chinese contemporary collector market — the largest contemporary art buying market globally — and helped set up the record-breaking 2019 Sotheby's Hong Kong sale of THE KAWS ALBUM for approximately USD 14.7 million.
Where did Where the End Starts originate before Shanghai?
The survey originated at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in October 2016 and was expanded and reformatted for its Shanghai presentation at the Yuz Museum.
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