An artist’s book about language, symbols, and the failure of meaning Two Kids, One Grown-up marks a final punctuation mark—or rather, a blown-up footnote—in John Baldessari’s decades-long engagement with image and language.

Inspired by his 2017 emoji works, the book is neither linear narrative, children’s book, nor traditional catalogue, but a conceptual experiment in book form.

Oversized emojis and symbolic body fragments form its visual vocabulary. Baldessari uses these seemingly universal icons to expose their semantic emptiness. What looks familiar and readable remains oddly elusive.

The book is intentionally fragmentary. Any narrative—if it exists at all—arises in the viewer’s mind, through associations between images and minimal text. Each page resembles a storyboard without a script, a line of visual poetry without words. What remains is a shifting play of meaning and surface, a catalogue of appearances that mirrors nothing but itself.

The work echoes Baldessari’s larger practice: irony, systemic critique, visual thinking through language, and skepticism toward fixed interpretation. Two Kids, One Grown-up may be one of his most distilled gestures—an experiment in visual thought where meaning gives way to questioning.