Yung Jake is a multi-platform creator who fuses the digital and physical worlds in visual artworks, rap videos, apps and digital art made for the internet. His mediums have ranged from found and fabricated metal “combines” to video installations that reflect on pop culture, social media, consumerism, and the internet. In his “combines,” Yung Jake digitally distorts characters from cartoons and video games, as well as images of consumer products, creating twisted, elongated shapes rendered on metal. Well known for his emoji portraits, Yung Jake produces likenesses of celebrities and internet personalities in the form of pointillist portraits generated using his app, emoji.ink. The artist’s continuously evolving toolkit of internet content, combined with personal and lyrical ideas on mass culture and the internet, is a response to the ubiquity of online life and mediated experiences.
Born in Sag Harbor and raised in Bali, New Zealand, and Bridgehampton, NY, Yung Jake was established on the internet in 2011 and received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2012. He has had eleven solo exhibitions since 2014, including several shows with Steve Turner, Los Angeles, a project at Art Berlin Contemporary, Berlin, and two exhibitions at Tripoli Gallery, Southampton, NY. His artwork has been included in more than 20 group shows, and featured at venues such as Sundance Film Festival, and in performances throughout Los Angeles, including Hammer Museum, REDCAT, MOCA, The Getty Center, and in New York at The Museum of Modern Art. Yung Jake exhibited in Finland in 2017 at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, and in China at OCAT Shanghai with KADIST San Francisco in 2018.