KAWS GROWS THE COMPANION TO 30 METERS AT WEST LAKE

KAWS' newest Companion reclines thirty meters long on a lawn at the edge of Hangzhou's West Lake, crossed out eyes turned up at the sky. He built it two meters longer than the one that floated on Seoul's Seokchon Lake in 2018, the piece that made him, at the time, the artist behind his own largest work. Hangzhou takes the record from September 24 through 27, 2026, and it costs nothing to see, which says more about where KAWS wants his audience than any museum wall could.

Twenty Eight Meters Was the Record Until Now

Seoul set the mark first. In July 2018, AllRightsReserved and LOTTE floated a 28 meter Companion across Seokchon Lake, and coverage of the launch called it, plainly, the largest thing KAWS had made to that point. Hangzhou's West Lake version runs two meters past that figure, land bound instead of floating, reclining on grass instead of drifting on water at the Orioles Singing in the Willows section of the lake's Ten Scenes.

The scale gap reads even bigger next to KAWS' most recent American stop. The 36 foot inflatable Companion that anchored KAWS FAMILY on SFMOMA's rooftop closed this past May at barely a third of Hangzhou's length. Four months later, that character returns nearly three times the size, on a different continent, timed to a different holiday on the calendar.

Mid Autumn Moonlight Gives the Figure Its Pose

The sculpture rests on its side in the grass at Orioles Singing in the Willows, a garden first named among the Ten Scenes of West Lake during the Southern Song Dynasty for its willow lined shore. West Lake itself has carried UNESCO World Heritage status as a cultural landscape since June 2011, which makes this the rare KAWS stop sitting inside a protected historic site rather than a museum plaza or a shopping district.

Its head tilts back toward open sky, gazing up the way a person might lie down to watch the Mid Autumn moon rise, which lands during the week the piece opens. AllRightsReserved already ran a test inflation at an undisclosed site before shipping the work to Hangzhou, standard practice for a sculpture this size. No ticket or admission fee is required across the four days, and the garden keeps its normal public hours for the run.

Vienna Closes the Same Week Hangzhou Opens

KAWS' institutional calendar does not pause for the sculpture tour. His Art and Comix survey at Vienna's Albertina Modern, which hangs his work alongside Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, closes September 27, the day the West Lake Companion is scheduled to come down.

His auction average over the past year sits at 71,046 dollars, a fraction of the 14.8 million dollar record The Kaws Album set at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2019. A free public sculpture in a Chinese park does not touch that number. It does something the auction floor cannot; it puts the work in front of thousands of people who will never bid on a canvas, in a month when a museum survey also puts him next to three artists who shaped his visual language.

Westlake 66 Puts a Five Month Old Mall Behind the Willows

Hang Lung opened Westlake 66 in Hangzhou's Wulin district this past April 28, a 390,200 square meter complex holding Zhejiang province's first Mandarin Oriental hotel, and the developer is named as the sculpture's local partner. The pairing tracks with what Uniqlo has run with KAWS Universe since naming him its first Artist in Residence in September 2025, a retail relationship built on foot traffic, not gallery walls or auction paddles.

A public sculpture beside a five month old luxury complex serves the function a rooftop inflatable served at SFMOMA and a glowing Companion served at Shanghai's North Bund in 2024. It pulls a crowd a group show alone would not reach, and it lets a developer or a retailer borrow that attention for the week, long after the last visitor has left the lawn.

Thirty meters beats twenty eight by two, four days of free viewing beats a ticketed museum run, and a lawn beside a five month old mall in Hangzhou now outsizes the rooftop that closed in San Francisco in May. KAWS keeps stacking venues instead of settling on one, and the Companion keeps growing to fit whichever skyline he lands in next.