Kenny Scharf has arrived in Shanghai with his first major museum exhibition in China. This show is a colorful journey through emotions, full of his signature playful and surreal style.

About the Artist

Kenny Scharf is one of the original wild kids of the NYC East Village scene. If you've ever wondered what it's like to walk inside someone's technicolor emotions, this might be your shot. Spread across three floors, "Emotional" is a high-octane mix of graffiti, pop, sci-fi, and good old-fashioned feelings.

Scharf came up alongside Basquiat and Keith Haring, and you can feel the same streetwise energy pulsing through his cartoonish, candy-colored creatures. But while Haring leaned graphic and Basquiat cerebral, Scharf is all about pure visual joy, and a bit of anxiety underneath the surface.

Highlights

The show dives headfirst into six core emotions: joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and awe, each housed in its own color-drenched environment. Think emoji face gallery meets psychedelic funhouse. On the second floor, Scharf's manic grins and warped expressions sit alongside Old Masters like Rembrandt and Goya. It's a bit cheeky, but it also works. Who says cartoon faces can't feel things deeply?

Upstairs, things get weirder (in a good way). The third floor is a full-on chromatic breakdown of human emotion, and then on the fourth, the whole place goes off the rails, in a very Kenny Scharf way. The "Beach Club" is basically a daydream version of Miami transplanted to the banks of the Huangpu: pink sand, lifeguard towers, inflatable toys, and Scharf's trippy sculptures lounging under fake palm trees. It's surreal, silly, and sneakily thoughtful.

Bonus

On Saturdays until August 16, the fourth floor turns into a pop-up party venue courtesy of System, the Shanghai club that's been operating nomad-style since their venue shut last year. So you can dance through your feelings, too.

Get your ticket here and step inside his vibrant world.