In his solo exhibition STICKER UP!, Taiwanese artist KEA TSAI uses “stickers” from street culture as the main theme of the exhibition. By appropriating a variety of classics and famous images, he delves into the contemporary social phenomena which embraces capitalism, and the association between the individual, power relations and ideology.

KEA reflects his artist career— in 2002, he started his creation from the street—, and the very beginning of mind that he left stickers everywhere in the city. This is the starting point and the theme through the entire exhibition. By flipping, appropriation, and parody, he integrates what he sees in the streets and daily life. And the visual forms present his own views and sense of humor. He re-creates and reorganizes different images into brand new artworks, where he expresses intention, and then achieves different contexts such as joke, wit, satire, and criticism.

In this exhibition, the artist further presents the society that has evolved from a war between individual thinking to a confrontation of collective consciousness, which in turn causes turmoil of globalization, and even leads to actual war. The tension of power relations eventually form a new individual consciousness. Under these sugarcoats created by capitalism -- popular name brands, memes, and social media, etc. -- are the disguises of social problems such as the cult of personality, the proliferation of guns and drugs, the government surveillance, and the continuous expansion of cultural hegemony. These make people feel nervous and anxious about the "truth". In recent years, social movements and security crises around the world are mostly caused by the invisible power. Some people choose to embrace the sugarcoats, while some continue to explore the whole picture underneath. Through the appropriation technique that KEA has always been good at, he captures some elements of ready-made objects to re-compose, giving them completely different meanings from the original. He uses stickers as a metaphor for another kind of "packaging", in a dark humorous way, pointing out the cruel reality in the contemporary fairy tales.