NCS
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For some folks, Instagram’s infinite scroll is an countless time waster. For celebrated younger South Korean artist Moka Lee, it’s the principle supply of inspiration for her portrait work, which have bought for tons of of hundreds of {dollars}.
“I can observe countless people with just my phone without meeting them,” Lee tells NCS. “I wait to find something unique in the pictures that I come across by chance through the algorithm,” she provides.
This week, her portrait “Surface Tension 07,” of a younger lady she encountered on the social media app and painted from the photograph she had posted, will probably be exhibited by the London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa on the Art Basel artwork honest in Switzerland. It exhibits a younger lady carrying a saggy white t-shirt smiling broadly, her bangs falling into her eyes.
Lee, 28, has used different sources to search out photos, together with Google search and the work of American photographer Nan Goldin, however she says she finds it intriguing to look at how folks current themselves of their extremely curated Instagram posts.
“It may be a bit dark in some ways, but I think it is a very interesting method for me because I can observe so many people sharing themselves,” she says. “People use the very few pictures that they have on Instagram to express themselves.”
When she finds {a photograph} she likes, she sends the potential topic a direct message (DM) to ask if she will be able to purchase the rights to the picture.
Jason Haam, whose Seoul gallery represents Lee, says that Lee’s relationship together with her topics displays how human interplay has modified over time.
“Mona Lisa would have been painted with a person sitting in front of the artist all the time,” he says, referring to Leonardo da Vinci’s Sixteenth-century masterpiece.
Lee “just DMs this person that she never met and says, ‘Oh, I’d like to paint your portrait and I’ll pay you a certain amount of money.’ And they never see each other,” he says.
The artist has already had monumental success together with her work, showing at main exhibits like Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023. “It brought so much interest from around the globe,” says Haam. After that, “it was really just immediate stardom,” he provides.
In late 2024, her portray “I’m Not Like Me” — which depicts a red-lipstick-wearing, camisole-clad lady sitting on a mattress — bought for more than $200,000 at a Hong Kong public sale.
That’s a “record price for an artist in their 20s in this country (South Korea),” says Haam.
Lee was additionally acknowledged in Artsy’s Vanguard list for 2025, which highlights 10 promising modern artists.
She tells NCS that her requests to Instagram customers used to get rejected lots, however now that she’s higher identified, it’s simpler to get folks to conform to turn into the topics of her work.
A not too long ago accomplished portray, measuring 190 centimeters (about six toes) tall by 160 centimeters (about 5 toes) extensive took her one month to finish, working for 10 hours a day, she says.
She makes use of oil paints, a historically Western medium — which she says was essential to take part in abroad artwork markets — however with what she calls “Asian techniques.” She factors to watercolor portray, wherein layers of paint are stacked to create depth and texture, as a supply of inspiration.
Her course of offers her work a definite aesthetic high quality, says Haam, explaining that Lee dilutes her paint. “She paints very, very thinly, but it’s layered up so that you can actually see all these mysterious colors coming up,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
It’s an aesthetic that’s shortly gaining traction amongst consumers.
“My career is now expanding from South Korea to overseas markets,” says Lee, “But I’m someone who just looks at my phone in a small room in my studio in South Korea, so it doesn’t feel real at all.”
With reporting by Erica Hwang.