With growing anxiety around the role of AI in today’s society, Agan Harahap produces When Yayoi Met Ali as a commentary on how photography can misrepresent reality and showcase the public’s obsession with celebrity culture. This remarkably believable scene recreates iconic artists from different times including Salvador Dalí, John Lennon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney and Andy Warhol (from left to right) and in the centre Muhammad Ali and Yayoi Kusama. The artist wants us to analyse the parasocial relationships we develop, particularly with the rise of digital media. It is interesting to question the choice of people in the photograph for they all share a connected past in public memory.

Salvador Dalí met Muhammad Ali in 1965 and it was a historic moment photographed to celebrate the larger-than-life personalities meeting. Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hockney paid tribute to Ali in their works during their respective rise in public fame. Similarly, John Lennon composed ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ in a tribute to Ali and his shared resistance and views. Andy Warhol made his iconic Muhammad Ali portrait paintings, marking a momentous occasion in his practice of making celebrity objects of veneration. However, the title of the artwork only focussed on Yayoi Kusuma’s interaction with Ali. While Yayoi herself had a creative engagement with Ali in 1967, making him a boxing robe in her iconic polka dots theme, the collaboration was glorified to be the meeting of the world of art and mainstream culture. All the people involved have been captured in one photograph, bringing up an obvious question of “Why?”. All the artists have played a role in immortalising Ali as a beloved celebrity figure, substantiating the phrase bestowed on him as the Greatest of All Time. However, at the same time, this brought the artists a lot of prestige and recognition themselves; Warhol’s Muhammad Ali painting sold for 420 million dollars at Christie’s.

The artists surrounding Ali act as a mirror to society, each fondly looking and cherishing the boxer. Agan wishes us to take a step back and realise our obsession with glorifying celebrities, aspiring to a so-called “perfect life” marked by fame, success and money. The platform we build for them blurs our ability to distinguish between where the real starts and artificial ends. There is an obvious and sad commodification of self that takes place when someone’s career is materialised to an artwork; commemorating their superiority in the public’s eye.