Artworks that show you who DeeKay is

SILK recently recorded a podcast with DeeKay Kwon in Seoul, in which Justin Gilanyi speaks with him about his artistic journey from drawing to animation and worldbuilding. In this article, Nina Knaack continues that conversation with DeeKay through the works themselves.

DeeKay is a digital artist whose characters’ directness is part of the work’s intelligence. He knows how to make a figure communicate within seconds, and that ability comes from years of motion design as much as from instinct. Before working independently as an artist, DeeKay moved through commercial studios and major tech environments, including Google and Apple. Those years trained him how to make an image readable and how to hold attention without having to overexplain.

Over the past five years, what has changed is the emotional weight carried by that visual language. DeeKay’s early work often began from simple representation or concept reversal. Later on, works have moved toward more complex, though very universal, subjects: acknowledgement, community, homesickness, mortality, love, and sadness, for example. Seen chronologically, the works featured in this article form a loose self-portrait, showing how an artist turned animation into a personal form of emotional observation.

Skateboard Rides You (2021)

Skateboard Rides You belongs to the moment when DeeKay was still working in motion design, besides building a more authored artistic practice. The premise here is immediate: the skateboard rides the human. It is a small inversion, like a cute visual joke.

DeeKay made the work during a period when he was focused more on why and how people engaged with his art. At that time, he began to understand that technical skills alone did not necessarily make people engage. “I realised that making something look cool was not enough,” he explains. “There had to be a concept, albeit a small one.”

Before that, his artworks were often driven by a technical interest: motion, graphics, rhythm, polishing, finish. Skateboard Rides You shows the beginning of another concern. The animation still has the crispness of motion design, though the central point is now conceptual: a familiar relationship between person and object is reversed, with the reversal opening up the work.

In our conversation, DeeKay does not overstate the piece though. He simply describes it as something “everyone can have a chuckle at.” That modesty suits the work and immediately shows you the person behind the artist.

Animator Creating Animation (2021)

Animator Creating Animation is more openly self-reflective. It places the act of making inside the work itself: an animator creates an animation, and the animation becomes a kind of companion. DeeKay had long been interested in the visual language of computer interfaces – windows, panels, tools, desktop space – and wanted to place one of his characters inside that environment.

He began with a rough idea rather than a complete storyboard. “The story developed while I was working,” he says. “I would usually recommend having the story first, but in this case the process was more instinctive.” In this case, that instinctive structure gives the work much of its feeling.

At its centre is a quiet statement about making things in a culture of metrics. DeeKay describes the work as a reminder that, even when no one is paying attention, the act of creation still has value. “Even if no one sees it, or if it receives very few likes, you still made something,” he says. “That creation can give something back to you. You can be proud of the fact that you made something out of thin air.”

This is one of the concepts that’s closest to his personal creative story. DeeKay’s career developed in close proximity to platforms, clients, collectors, and public response. He understands the pull of external validation but with Animator Creating Animation, he turns inward and gives an artist another measure: the work matters because it exists, because effort has taken form.

Happy Virus (2021)

Happy Virus is short, bright, and deliberately uncomplicated in tone. DeeKay made it from a concept he had before starting the animation: the idea of a person whose energy spreads to others. The title inevitably recalls the pandemic period, though DeeKay told me the work was inspired by a friend rather than by COVID-19. “She was always smiling and giving people positive energy,” he says. “When you were around her, you felt it. By making this work, I also wanted to become that kind of person.”

That last sentence gives the work more depth than its cheerful surface might initially suggest. Happy Virus is an animation about influence. It imagines mood as something transferable, almost bodily. A person’s energy moves outward, affecting others without needing a grand statement.

DeeKay’s early works are strongly connected to positivity. In Happy Virus, that positivity appears in its most direct form. The work wants to be light. It wants to lift the viewer without demanding too much.

I Love New York (2022) / I Love Korea (2023)

With I Love New York, we see how DeeKay has expanded from a single figure toward a populated environment. The work is full of small characters, each absorbed in its own action. Together they create a dense urban scene in which individual routines overlap.

New York carries biographical weight for DeeKay. He lived there for more than a decade, studied there, worked there, and began shaping his career there. “When I think of New York, I think of how many people are there, all the time,” he says. “Everyone has a different life, or comes to the city for a different reason, but they all exist together in the same place.” That thought became the structure of the work: the city represented as a field of simultaneous lives.

The making of this piece proved to be quite time consuming. DeeKay had to create many individual animations and place them within that one larger scene, co-living but not collapsing with each other. All the efforts and thought processes are very visible in the density of the image: every figure contributes to the sense of a city that never becomes singular.

I Love Korea, made the following year for his solo exhibition in Korea, approached ‘place’ differently. In the work we follow one character through a more concentrated story. DeeKay says the production took a similar amount of time, though it felt lighter because he was animating one central figure rather than dozens of small ones. “If I compare the two works I also see a shift in the visual language. I feel that by 2023, my design and animation had grown more refined already.”

Placed together, the works show two kinds of attachment. New York appears through crowds and speed, whereas Korea appears through return and personal narrative. Throughout, DeeKay’s life has been shaped by movement between these and other places: South Korea, New York, San Francisco, and now an increasingly international art context. These works let that appear.

LetsWalk is central to understanding DeeKay’s practice. The project began on March 27, 2021, with the aim of creating 100 unique walking characters. He completed the hundredth walk on October 27, 2022. The final 1/1 brings all of those characters together in one frame, turning roughly a year and a half of work into a shared animated world.

The walk cycle is one of animation’s basic exercises. It teaches weight, timing, balance, and personality. DeeKay took that foundational unit and made it the subject of the work. Each character is defined through movement: posture, pace, rhythm, hesitation, confidence. A ‘simple’ walk here became a compressed portrait.

The project also came from a practical awareness of his audience. Early in his digital art career, DeeKay’s 1/1 works rose quickly in price. He was grateful for that momentum, though he also noticed that many other collectors could no longer access his work. “I wanted to make a smaller edition, for more people to be able to become part of the community.”

In that sense, LetsWalk is both an artwork and a social structure. Its subject is many figures coexisting, and its format allowed more collectors to enter DeeKay’s world. The idea of community is present in the image and in the way the project circulated.

Because the project took almost two years to make, his skill changed while making it. “I can see where the later walks are smoother and more technically resolved,” he says. The quality improved as the project continued, and I feel this is where LetsWalk becomes more than a beautiful character project. Because, it actually preserves the record of improvement, shows the unevenness, the growth. The final work thus contains the time it took to make it and shows skill developing in public.

That ‘openness’ about progress connects to how DeeKay speaks about his own career. He often resists the idea of innate genius and describes himself as someone who improved through practice, repetition, and persistence. LetsWalk makes that belief visible. It is a work about walking, and it is also a work made by continuing to walk.

Life and Death (2022)

Life and Death is one of DeeKay’s best-known works. Its market history is significant, though for me the work itself is more interesting as a problem of condensation. DeeKay set himself the task of addressing one of the largest possible subjects in thirty seconds. “I wanted to try to tell a story about life and death,” he says. “It is a heavy subject, and I wanted to see whether I could make people feel something in a very short time.”

DeeKay was thinking about attention: how little time viewers often give to images, especially online or in crowded art contexts. The result is compressed and direct, but therefore also very deliberate and clear. His background in motion design becomes relevant here: he clearly knows how to make a short sequence legible. In Life and Death, that ability is applied to existential material rather than commercial communication.

The work also clarifies why DeeKay often returns to broad human themes. Love, death, exhaustion, joy, fear, care: these subjects can sound general when named, yet they are the material we all as people actually live with.

R U OK? (2025)

A recent development is that DeeKay is now conveying more difficult emotional states in his works as well, where ‘sharing positivity’ was his motto first. R U OK? is one of the clearest examples, taking a phrase that is often used casually and giving it the actual weight it deserves.

The artist describes it as one of the ‘darker’ works he has made, but the response from viewers showed him how strongly others connected to it. “Many people commented that this was exactly how they often felt,” he says. “I realised that the specific emotion matters less than whether people recognise themselves in it. And of course, people have all ranges of emotions, not only the happy ones.”

DeeKay connects this broader emotional range to the present moment. With so much AI-generated imagery circulating, he feels a stronger need to make work that carries a human presence. For him, that presence comes through emotional specificity. A work becomes meaningful when someone sees it and feels less alone with what they are experiencing.

Invisible Stories (2026)

When asked about his current favorite work, DeeKay chose Invisible Stories. This makes perfect sense to me, since the work brings several long-running elements together: crowds, private thoughts, public space, feelings, and the distance between how people appear and what they are carrying internally.

The idea for this piece came partly from watching strangers. DeeKay likes sitting in coffee shops and looking out at people passing by. He imagines their lives, their experiences, and the thoughts and feelings they may be keeping to themselves. “Everyone goes through so much,” he says. “But sadly there are so many emotions and experiences that we never fully share with anyone else.”

The work asks viewers to be more understanding with each other, with DeeKay’s central thought being: “You do not know what someone else is going through.” He relates this to his own life as well. From the outside, he may appear successful, cheerful, and surrounded by opportunity. Privately, he has gone through darker periods that he doesn’t share with everyone. “We all have ups and downs,” he says. “I want the work to remind people to be more thoughtful.”

The text fragments in Invisible Stories came from thoughts DeeKay wrote down himself. He wanted them to feel varied, as if each person in the scene carried a different interior life. The work extends ideas already present in I Love New York and LetsWalk: many figures share the same frame, while each remains separate.

Here, DeeKay’s worldbuilding becomes more psychologically explicit. A crowd is no longer only a crowd. It is now a gathering of unspoken worries, memories, hopes, and private life lines, with the animation giving temporary form to what usually remains hidden.

The world of DeeKay

DeeKay’s work is easy to enter because he has built a language of clarity. However, that clarity can make the works seem lighter than they are. His figures are often cute, his colors are controlled, and his timing is clean, yet the strongest works are concerned with subjects that are often difficult to hold: self-doubt, mortality, fear, the need for recognition.

What makes DeeKay an artist of integrity is his trust in small forms: a computer screen can become a place of self-encouragement; a walk can carry personality; a crowd can reveal how little we know about one another. The works do not announce their seriousness. That arrives by itself through color, rhythm, humor, texts, and overall visual ease.

His career also tells a story about labour. DeeKay speaks openly about practice, doubt, failing and improvement. He does not present himself as an untouchable talent, but as someone who kept drawing, kept posting, kept refining, and gradually accepted that the personal work he had been making alongside commercial jobs could become an artistic practice in its own right.

That humility gives the animations much of their force. The characters feel alive because they are made by someone who pays close attention to ordinary gestures. A click, a glance, a slump, a bounce, a repeated action: in DeeKay’s hands, these become ways of thinking about how people move through life. His work suggests that inner life is rarely dramatic from the outside. Most of the time, it appears in small movements, and DeeKay has built a practice around noticing them.