face lift nineteen: Minjae Lee
Digital Chaos, Human Impulse, and the emotional precision of Minjae Lee
“I find inspiration in the human face, abstract movement, and color. When I draw people, it’s on the spur of the moment—very spontaneous. I’m always experimenting with new materials and ways to do things.”
—Minjae Lee
In the Circle #1 Minjae Lee 2014
This week we are talking about digital and machine artists, the people who are most likely to be affected by AI art. We will explore artists creating digitally (and of course take a detour to my roots in analog photography). We are starting out with a Korean artist Celia recommended to me, Minjae Lee. He's a prolific, talented artist who creates mixed media pieces traditionally and digitally. I highly recommend you check him out.
Minjae Lee didn’t go to art school. He didn’t have formal training, or gallery connections, or a mentorship pipeline. What he had was a pen, a lot of color, and an internet connection.
Born in South Korea in 1989, Lee started drawing at 16. He worked primarily with markers and colored pencils, creating vivid, emotionally explosive portraits, especially of women, that combined chaos with control. Over time, he began blending traditional techniques with digital editing, not as a shortcut, but as a continuation of his process. His work lives somewhere between sketchbook and screen, saturated with color, emotionally raw, unapologetically stylized.
It was online that his art found its audience. Through design blogs and social media, Lee’s work reached an international following. He became one of the clearest examples of how a self-taught artist can build a global platform without gatekeeping. His pieces are now instantly recognizable: bright, confrontational faces splashed with electric reds, blues, and yellows. His portraits don’t just look at you. They glare.
Minjae Lee’s art may be digital, but it’s not machine-like. It’s emotional. Urgent. Unmistakably human. All of the works linked in today’s post are for sale on his website a reminder that yes, real humans are still making digital art, and they deserve to be supported.
Lee’s work begins on paper raw lines sketched by hand, built up with markers, pens, and layered color. Then he moves the work into Photoshop, not to "fix" it, but to expand it. His edits aren’t clean-up they’re continuation. It’s part collage, part painting, part digital experiment. His method blurs traditional and digital without ceding creative control to automation. He doesn’t remove the human from the image. He amplifies it.
His influences range widely, and you can see them in the controlled chaos of his compositions: the ornamental complexity of Gustav Klimt, the pop surrealism of Takashi Murakami, the dark-eyed intensity of Egon Schiele. But the result is entirely his own, sharp lines, layered colors, bold femininity, and eyes that seem to follow you even off-screen.
Despite his global recognition, Lee stays relatively quiet in interviews. He lets the work speak. It pulses with emotion. It contradicts itself. It feels like something that came from a body, not a template.
In a time when digital art is questioned for authenticity, Lee’s pieces embody labor, emotion, and intention. There’s nothing instant about his process. Each portrait is layered with time, technical skill, and a raw responsiveness to feeling. His use of digital tools isn’t about efficiency. It’s about access. Photoshop becomes brush, palette, and canvas. A screen becomes a field for experimentation, risk, and discovery.
His work thrives on spontaneity and emotional impulse; elements AI struggles to emulate without pastiche. Lee doesn’t illustrate from a place of neutrality; he works from instinct, often creating late into the night, chasing a shape or expression that resonates. The result isn’t clean perfection. It’s saturated emotion. Fragmented form. Controlled chaos. Art that insists on being felt, not just seen.
In an era of sleek filters and auto-generation, Minjae Lee reminds us that digital art can still carry breath, friction, and fire. It is still deeply, defiantly human
Full Post with images and prompts
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Comments (3)
Women with chaos and control. When ai read that I went back and studied the examples. Brilliant
No matter how much people quarrel about Ai and the digital world, it is here to stay. We have to find ways to co-exist. This is beautiful work, human work has heart, it will be obvious.
Love him so much!💜