Moka Lee (b.1996) paints portraits of today's youth, capturing both their brilliance and instability. Blurring the boundaries between portraiture, still life, and landscape painting, Lee’s work embraces the underlying anxieties of youth hidden beneath the vibrant images displayed on social media.

Moka Lee selects anonymous faces encountered by chance on social media platforms like Instagram, rather than working with real-life models. The young individuals in these images stare directly at the camera or smile brightly, yet their inner anxieties and sense of helplessness remain hidden.

For the younger generation, social media is not only a space for documenting daily life but also a stage for presenting their lives to others. As a result, the conscious curation of their online presence further conceals their true emotions.

Moka Lee captures the subtle cracks in the carefully curated performances of social media. In the act of posting idealized versions of daily life, she discovers a quiet defiance among youth—a silent struggle to move forward despite unfavorable circumstances. 

Her 2020 solo exhibition, 《Flame in a Small Room》, at Gallery ANOV, presented works that portray this generation with a sense of warmth and understanding. In these paintings, flames emerge as a recurring motif alongside anonymous faces collected from Instagram. The flickering, soundless movement of the flames mirrors the quiet resistance of the figures within the works.

The artist situates these flames within a "room," which can be interpreted as the inner world of either the artist or the figures in the paintings. This setting reflects the artist's hope that the flickering flames within each person can serve to warm and illuminate their inner selves or burn away the burdens they carry.

Meanwhile, the bright and vivid faces of youth seen on screens take on a murky palette and faded tones under the artist’s brush. Moka Lee employs a technique similar to the layering process of digital printing, where four colors (CMYK) are sequentially built up to complete the surface. 

Through this process, traces of layered brushstrokes and multiple transparent paint layers soften the exaggerated atmosphere of the image, creating a space where intimate emotions can gradually emerge.

Moka Lee’s paintings emphasize the stark contrast between an intense, flash-like light and the surrounding darkness that recedes into the background. This interplay of light and shadow recalls the long tradition in art history of using dramatic illumination to capture fundamental human anxieties, tension, sorrow, and contemplation. 

The shadowed darkness, often abstracted into large color fields or cast across a subject’s face like a veil, blurs their bright expressions. This looming darkness, as if attempting to consume the subject, serves as a metaphor for a society that isolates individuals.

As brushstrokes are layered upon the coarse texture of cotton canvas, the original image drifts further away from the artist’s grasp. The once smooth surface dissolves into traces of the brush, blurring the image, while the subject’s expression becomes trapped within densely stacked layers of color. 

Veiled behind this hazy curtain of pigment, the figure loses specificity, no longer referring to a particular individual but instead merging with the emotions of individuals navigating life in this era.

Moka Lee appropriates images sourced from social media yet reconstructs them through her distinctive painterly techniques, crafting a narrative uniquely her own. She keenly observes the subtle, intentional elements that individuals embed within their photographs—clues or objects carefully placed—then twists their original meanings, injecting a sense of dissonance into the composition through playful wit and subversion. 

As a result, the subjects within her paintings exist in an ambiguous, dual state, resisting direct interpretation. Neither one thing nor the other, these figures provoke a sense of uncertainty, leaving the viewer suspended in a moment of perplexity.

Moka Lee believes that "everyone possesses dualities, and at times, we feel confusion stemming from them." In this context, social media, which represents a version of oneself that is not the true self but rather one curated for others, has become a place where the dualities of today’s individuals are even more pronounced.
 
Thus, the concept of duality that runs throughout her work is deeply connected to the identities of individuals living in the same era, including the artist herself.

In her solo exhibition 《Innuendo》, held at Jason Haam in 2023, Moka Lee presented works featuring contemporary female figures found on social media. These figures are portrayed within a narrative that simultaneously expresses excitement and solemnity, beauty and intensity, and innocence and impurity.

Like the thin appearance of her paintings, which, upon closer inspection, reveal layers of paint built up firmly on the surface, the expressions of the figures in her works convey mysterious and enigmatic emotions. The dualities that emerge in these pieces reflect the artist's exploration of the relationship between the inherent self and the persona.

For example, the ‘Ego Function Error’ (2022-) series addresses the events and emotions that arise as one's ego is formed during the process of growth, capturing the dualities formed in that process. Meanwhile, the ‘Surface Tension’ (2023-) series, painted on large canvases, more intricately captures moments when emotions reach their peak.

Compared to her previous works, Moka Lee's portraits, which have nearly doubled in size, began to be painted with the artist's contemplation on the relationship between the viewer and the figure. Moka Lee says that, in order to avoid the interpretation of the female figure painted on a small canvas being perceived as weak, she enlarged the size of the canvas to give the figure a more declarative presence, as if it were stepping onto a stage.

Moka Lee establishes a relationship between various perspectives surrounding her works. In Ego Function Error 02 (2023), where dozens of goldfish are tangled together, staring straight ahead, she metaphorically expresses a dual situation in which she observes people online as spectators, while also being in a position of being observed herself. The unpredictable gaze of others and the masses are represented by the goldfish, with the screen of the web acting as the barrier of the fish tank, conveying a sense of threatening emotion.

The narrative, which presents an omniscient point of view to the viewers, is spoken by one or multiple directional gazes within the work and it ultimately ends with the gaze of a viewer- ‘thinking about me’. The figures which are inexplicably connected to the artist’s identity speak to viewers constantly and encourage them to ponder about their beings and only then, the artist’s objectives are immaculately enfranchised.

In this way, Moka Lee captures the unstable duality inherent in the faces of countless young individuals. Her paintings, which appear thin and transparent yet are built with solid brushstrokes, express the clash of these unstable emotions and contemporary identities through the language of painting.

”I want to confuse people with my paintings. I want them to think maybe it is a photography from afar and recognize it is a painting after seeing it closely- and when they look closely, I want to make sure that it is unsure whether the work is on canvas or paper.

I would like it if people thought my paintings could be painted by both male and female artists. I meant my paintings to be filled with these little dualities. This way, the way you understand a painting can always be renewed and kept fresh.” (Moka Lee, Jason Haam, 2023)

Moka Lee obtained BFA from Sejong University and is currently studying painting at the Korea National University of Arts. Her solo exhibitions include 《FACE ID》 (Carlos/Ishikawa, London, 2025), 《Innuendo》 (Jason Haam, Seoul, 2023), and 《Flame in a Small Room》 (Gallery ANOV, Seoul, 2020), and she held a solo exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong in the 'Discoveries' section in 2023.

Her group exhibitions include 《Karma II》 (Jason Haam, Frieze No.9 Cork Street, London, 2025), 《SeMA Omnibus: At the End of the World Split Endlessly》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Masterful Attention Seekers》 (Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Busan, 2024), 《Artificial Tears》 (Museumhead, Seoul, 2024), 《Jason Haam: Five Years, Part One》 (Jason Haam, Seoul, 2022), and 《Is There Any Place For Us?》 (ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul, 2021), among others.

Moka Lee was awarded the DDP Prize at Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival in 2019, and in 2024, she was selected as the only Korean artist for The Artsy Vanguard 2025.

References

• 제이슨함, 이목하 (Jason Haam, Moka Lee)
• 루이즈더우먼, 이목하 (Louise the Women, Moka Lee)
• 아트인컬처,  [New Look] 이목하 – 청춘의 페르소나, 떨림의 순간 (조재연), 2024.04.22
• 아트렉처, 약하지만 강한 존재들의 무해한 저항 – 이목하 개인전: ‘방 안의 큰 불’ 
• 제이슨함, 창백한 말 (Jason Haam, Innuendo)
• 디스위켄드룸, [서문] 0인칭의 자리 – 박지형 (ThisWeekendRoom, [Preface] Is there any place for us? –  Jihyung Park)
• 아트조선, 아릿한 불협화음의 하모니, 마치 ‘이목하’의 그림처럼, 2023.09.27
• BAZAAR, 떠오르는 여성 아티스트 4, 2023.10.15