Super Pop Stars

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SUPER POP STARS

Super Pop Star is and editorial design project that associated with a fictional exhibition. This exhibition embraces the unique perspective of artists and geographic contexts situated in the burgeoning new consumer and industrialized societies from the 1950s to present day. It is about iconography, which helps us to question, to assume, and to understand these pop icons, and then finally touch on the identity of its society during that era. Pop was not a movement, not a style, but an ethos, one that permeated the consciousness of artists worldwide during a time of unprecedented social and cultural change.

It represented a brief moment in the early to mid-1960s when young artists—from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, New York to London—turned away from abstraction and preconceived notions of high art and engaged the kitsch, the low, and the quotidian. Pop artists were inspired by new advances in visual culture, and the abundance of images transmitted via new print technologies, wider means of distribution, and the rise of television. Collectively, and from different vantage points, attitudes, and identities, artists began to co-opt the everyday objects, signs and castaways of mass production, sampling celebrity culture, comic books, advertising, and propaganda. It affirmed its belief in the power of the image, and it was often humorously, even ironically, re-appropriation of iconic figures such as JFK and Marilyn Monroe, in order to both celebrate and criticize icons at the same time. They recycled, satirized, celebrated, and reframed the world that was emerging around them, even as they merged into it.

This group of remarkable stars were created in reaction to society, including such formative figures from the Pop art movement to modern culture: Andy Worhol and Jeff Koons, who offered up typical performance of the consuming culture; Yayoyi Kusama and David Hockney, with their new exploration of identity in a new country of residence; Keith Haring and Kaws, depicting street culture in different periods through characters reminiscent of babies and mice; or Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, with their exposition of a zeitgeist, a neo-neo classicism and futuristic dystopia . These formative icons are metaphors depicting ‘the American way of life’.