In 2019, the last batch of post-80s generation will turn 30.

In the adult world, the childhood of "drawing villains" has gone a little far.

When we were young, everyone could draw. When we picked up a pen, we could draw villains, jungle paintings, monsters and Star Wars paintings. When we grew up, many people would not. No wonder the artist Keith Haring would say:

Children know something that most people have forgotten
——Keith Haring

From 1980 to 1989, the birth and childhood of the post-80s generation was also Keith Haring's golden decade, from 20 to 30 years old.

In the past ten years, he has been continuously "painting villains" all over the world, from subway stations to museums, from billboards to the Berlin Wall, with faster and faster speed, more and more smooth lines, more and more clear symbols, more and more profound themes, from unknown to world-famous.

In the past ten years, he has changed from a young drifter seeking freedom to a central figure in the New York art circle. Of course, Andy Warhol has contributed a lot.

He made many friends, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Patti Smith, Grace Jones

They also sent away many friends and lovers, Andy Warhol, Jean Michele Basquet, Juan Dubose

The decade of the 1980s gave him impetus and exhausted his life. In February 1990, Keith Haring died of AIDS at the age of 31.

His vitality, his temperament, his early death, his HIV positive, perhaps no one better represents the New York of the 1980s than Keith Haring.

Like people, some people need more oxygen than others, as was the case in New York in the 1980s.

At that time, it was struggling from the edge of bankruptcy to prosperity. People lived louder and harder, and died earlier. On the one hand, it is the publicity of vitality, on the other hand, it is the uncontrollable AIDS - the two extremes have not only injected strong creativity into the city, but also changed the city forever.

1、 19 years old, New York is the only place he can go

In 1978, 19 year old Keith Haring left Pennsylvania and came to New York because his hometown could no longer satisfy him.

When he was young, he drew cartoons and created characters and stories with his father. Keith Haring, who thought he would go to Disney when he grew up, was forced to learn commercial art, but soon dropped out of school. He didn't want to be a cartoonist or graphic designer. He wanted to be an artist.

At the age of 18, he took his girlfriend to travel around the United States by car to see different works of art and began to be influenced by some modern artists.

Seeing Pierre Alechinsky's large retrospective exhibition at Carnegie Museum was the first time that he saw "a person older than me doing something similar to my abstract painting", which gave him new confidence.

He was also influenced by Christo. After Christo finished his work Running Fence, he realized that public art can bring artistic creation to a broader field than traditional views, and they can communicate with more different people, rather than regard art as the exclusive subject of elitism.

At the age of 19, he began to want a bigger stage, a more free environment, and a big breakthrough - New York was the only place he could go.

At that time, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy. Although the municipal government was rescued by the federal government, the city experienced unprecedented serious differentiation between the rich and the poor, between luxury and degradation, between brilliance and marginalization, and between the upper and lower urban areas.

The art world in New York also shows a kind of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there are pop stars in the Upper East Side, and on the other hand, there are graffiti artists in the Experimental East Village.

Keith Haring won a scholarship from the New York Institute of Visual Arts, studied semiotics with concept artist Bill Beckley, studied hieroglyphics and primitive art, and tried the possibility of video shooting and performing arts. He learned the literary creation ideas of William Burroughs, a writer of the Beat generation, and expressed his views with hidden information and mutual connections between words and pictures, A lot of writing has also begun.

He looked for a unique way of visual communication in these attempts. People, animals, UFOs, pyramids... These figures began to symbolize, and began to develop into a set of his own pictorial vocabulary.