Moka Lee

Moka Lee was born in 1996 in South Korea. She earned a BFA in painting (Western painting) from Sejong University in 2021 and went on to study fine arts at the Korea National University of Arts, listed as an MFA completed in 2022 on her most recent gallery CV, though some earlier gallery biographies described her as still enrolled in that program. She lives and works in Seoul.

Lee's practice centers on portraits sourced from images she finds on strangers' social media accounts, often screenshots or reposted photographs, which she translates into paint. The work has been described in the art press as a form of social media scavenging, using found digital likenesses to raise questions about identity, visibility, and the ordinary surveillance built into online life.

She won the DDP Prize at ASYAAF, the Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival, in Seoul in 2019, and held early solo exhibitions at Gallery ANOV and Yugiche in 2020. Representation by Jason Haam in Seoul followed, culminating in her 2023 solo show Innuendo. Her international profile expanded quickly from there: a 2025 solo debut in the United Kingdom with Carlos/Ishikawa in London, selection for the Artsy Vanguard 2025 cohort, and a 2026 United States solo debut, Persona Works, at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.

Lee's rapid rise has drawn attention from both the Korean and international art press. The Art Newspaper profiled her in 2025 under the framing of a social media scavenger, describing her practice of building paintings from images found on strangers' accounts. CNN Style covered the same body of work, focusing on how she turns anonymous Instagram photographs into painted portraits. Her selection for the Artsy Vanguard 2025 list placed her among a small group of artists identified as shaping the current conversation in contemporary painting. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, and none is quoted here as a result.

Lee's auction market consists, as of this profile's data date, of a single confirmed result. I'm Not Like Me (2020) sold for HK$1,651,000 (about USD 211,000) at Phillips Hong Kong on 25 November 2024, in the Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Korean and international press described the sale as her auction debut and noted that it far exceeded its estimate, an unusually strong result for a painter still in her twenties.

Because this is her only public auction result to date, it should be read as a single data point rather than a trend line. Her market currently runs mostly through primary gallery sales and waitlists at Jason Haam and Carlos/Ishikawa, with the David Kordansky Gallery exhibition adding institutional visibility, and the auction result serving as an early signal of secondary demand rather than an established pattern.

Moka Lee's market is very young. There is no catalogue raisonne, and authentication runs through her representing galleries, Jason Haam and Carlos/Ishikawa, rather than an independent board or estate. Her only confirmed auction result, the November 2024 Phillips Hong Kong sale, exceeded its estimate substantially, but a single sale cannot establish a reliable price trend, and collectors should expect future auction appearances to move that picture meaningfully in either direction. Given her institutional momentum, from the Seoul Museum of Art collection to a 2026 Los Angeles gallery exhibition, provenance and gallery documentation matter more than usual at this early stage of her market.