KAWS Brings FELLOWS Into the Dark With a New All Black Vinyl Figure

KAWS has confirmed FELLOWS, a new 11.2 inch vinyl and paint figure, releasing later this month through kawsone.com and Seoul’s Space K.

KAWS has confirmed a new addition to his running line of vinyl collectible. FELLOWS, dated 2026 and rendered in vinyl and paint, measures 11.2 by 5.7 by 5.9 inches and is set to release later this month through kawsone.com, the artist’s own online store, alongside Seoul’s Space K museum. The announcement arrived through the artist’s own channels rather than a press release, tagged simply with the artist’s name and no accompanying statement about pricing, edition size, or an exact release date, which is consistent with how KAWS tends to introduce new figures before a formal retail listing goes live.

The dual sales channel, split between the artist’s direct storefront and a Korean culture institution, points to something beyond a routine collectible drop. It suggests FELLOWS was built to accompany a specific moment rather than exist as a standalone release, a pattern KAWS has followed before when figures have tied into museum programming, gallery openings, or site specific install rather than dropping in isolation.

kawsone.com itself currently sits behind a mailing list signup page rather than an active storefront, standard practice for the site in the days before a listed release goes live. Buyers who want early word on exact timing and price are directed to sign up through the site directly rather than rely on secondary retailers, several of which have spun up product pages using the FELLOWS name well ahead of any confirmed listing. None of those secondary sites carry any confirmed relationship to KAWS or his studio, and pricing or availability claims made on them should be treated as unverified until kawsone.com itself goes live with the release.

That caution is worth taking seriously given how KAWS releases have historically played out. Open edition drops on kawsone.com have a track record of selling through within minutes, sometimes seconds, of going live, a pattern that has made the artist’s direct store one of the more closely watched release calendars in collectible art regardless of what a given figure is priced at. The site does not accept American Express, only Visa and Mastercard, and past guidance from longtime buyers has centered on sticking to a single colorway rather than spreading entries across multiple options, since the volume of interest tends to punish anyone trying to secure more than one unit. Whether FELLOWS follows the same instant sellout pattern will depend on the edition size KAWS Studio settles on, information that, like pricing, has not yet been made public.

 

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fig

FELLOWS departs from some of KAWS’ more brightly colored figures in favor of an all black finish, a choice that pushes the sculptural detailing to the front rather than letting color carry the piece. The figure is shown bent forward at the waist, both hands raised to hold its own head, a posture that reads as weary or reflective depending on the angle it is photographed from. The artist’s signature X marked eyes appear across the face, rendered in a way that stays legible even against the dark base color, and a small red circular accent sits at the top of the piece, the one note of color breaking up an otherwise monochrome object.

Oversized hands and feet, a hallmark of KAWS’ character work going back to his earliest Companion sculptures, carry through here as well, giving the compact figure a presence larger than its actual dimensions would suggest. The surface treatment leans textured rather than smooth, with view sculpture detailing across the body that rewards close inspection rather than a quick glance, a quality that has become one of the more consistent throughlines across KAWS’ vinyl output regardless of which character or pose a given release takes.

At just under a foot tall, FELLOWS sits comfortably within the scale KAWS has used for shelf sized collectibles for years, smaller than his museum grade sculptural works but large enough to hold its own as a standalone object rather than reading as a miniature. The vinyl and paint combination listed for the piece keeps it in line with the material approach the artist has relied on since his OriginalFake era, when limited edition vinyl toys first introduced his character work to a wider audience beyond the gallery system.

The bent forward, head cradling pose also sets FELLOWS apart from some of the more upright, front facing stances KAWS has used across the Companion line. Recent releases have leaned into poses that read as introspective or exhausted rather than the wide armed, cheerful stances that defined earlier figures, a shift that tracks with the artist’s own description of his characters as vessels for whatever emotional register he happens to be working through at the time. Whether that reading applies specifically to FELLOWS is something only KAWS himself could confirm, but the pose fits comfortably within a body of work that has increasingly treated its cartoon language as a way to process something closer to real human feeling than pure pop art irony.

The title itself is worth sitting with too. KAWS has a long habit of naming figures and paintings after plain, almost conversational phrases rather than anything ornate, and FELLOWS follows that same instinct, a word that suggests companionship without specifying whether that companionship is warm or simply circumstantial. That ambiguity lines up closely with the framing of the Seoul exhibition the figure is timed to, which draws its own title from a similar distinction between relationships people choose and ones they are simply placed into.

brief

KAWS is the professional name of Brian Donnelly, an American artist born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1974. Donnelly graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1996 with a degree in illustration and briefly worked as a freelance animator for Disney, contributing to productions including 101 Dalmatians and Doug before moving fully into his own practice. His earliest recognition came from graffiti work in New York in the early 1990s, where he became known for altering existing advertisements around the city rather than working on blank walls, a habit that shaped the pop culture literacy still visible in his work today.

Donnelly’s best known character, Companion, first appeared in 1999 through a collaboration with the Japanese streetwear label Bounty Hunter, and has since become one of the most recognizable figures in contemporary collectible art, appearing in scales ranging from a few inches to sculptures towering several stories tall. Companion, along with related characters like Chum and BFF, forms the visual language that runs through nearly everything KAWS has released since, whether in painting, sculpture, or the vinyl figure format FELLOWS belongs to.

KAWS opened OriginalFake, a retail store and brand in Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood, in the early 2000s alongside Medicom Toy, a partnership that ran until 2013 and helped cement his standing within Japan’s toy collecting culture, a community that continues to treat his vinyl work with the same seriousness applied to fine art editions. Since then, his work has moved steadily further into institutional territory, with solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and, most recently, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. He is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler, which maintains gallery spaces in Berlin, Paris, and London alongside an exhibition space in Marfa, Texas.

Alongside that institutional track record, KAWS has kept a steady presence in fashion and streetwear, designing the cover art for Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak in 2008 and collaborating with Kim Jones on his debut collection as creative director of Dior Homme in 2019, on top of long running product work with Uniqlo, Nike, and Comme des Garçons. That dual track, moving between museum walls and mass market product drops, is a large part of why a single vinyl figure release from KAWS draws the kind of attention usually reserved for entire gallery openings. Collectors who first encountered his work through a toy shelf and those who know him through a museum retrospective end up chasing the same limited object, which has done as much as anything to keep secondary market prices on his figures well above their original retail cost.

why

FELLOWS lands the same month KAWS opens his first institutional exhibition in Korea. FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS runs at Space K, Seoul, from July 23 through December 27, 2026, and takes its title from the tension between friendship, a relationship people choose, and the more circumstantial closeness of living near someone. According to the gallery representing the show, the exhibition works through both the warmth and the friction of those everyday connections, using KAWS’ familiar cast of characters to carry that idea across painting and sculpture.

Space K itself is a museum in Seoul’s Magok district, built and operated by the Kolon Group, known for hosting contemporary exhibitions across painting, media art, and install work inside a distinctive, staircase shaped building. Pairing a vinyl figure release with a museum show is not a new move for KAWS. Figures tied to his HOLIDAY series have accompanied site specific installations in cities including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei, and the Companion figures released in 2016 launched alongside his Where the End Starts exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. FELLOWS appears to be following that same logic, giving visitors and collectors a physical object connected to the exhibition rather than treating the museum show and the retail release as entirely separate events.

The timing also places FELLOWS inside an unusually dense stretch of KAWS programming. Beyond the Seoul opening, his work currently appears in a group exhibition at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg and at Albertina Modern in Vienna, and he is scheduled for a public conversation with cartoonist Chris Ware at the Art Institute of Chicago in mid August, tied to a concurrent Willem de Kooning exhibition there. Across all of it, the throughline stays consistent with what KAWS has built his career on: cartoon lang, repeated characters, and objects designed to move fluidly between a museum wall and a collector’s shelf.

For Space K, landing KAWS’ first Korean institutional show is a significant get in its own right. The museum, built by Kolon Group as part of a broader push into cultural programming, has spent recent years positioning itself as a serious contemporary art destination inside Seoul rather than a corporate showcase, and an artist with KAWS’ crossover reach between the art market and mainstream collecting culture gives that positioning real weight. South Korea has also become one of the more active markets for KAWS collecting in recent years, with members of BTS among the more publicly known collectors of his work, which makes Seoul a logical place for the artist to stage a first institutional show rather than an unexpected one.