DeeKay

DeeKay is the artist name of DeeKay Kwon, a South Korean animator who lives and works in San Francisco. He spent more than ten years as a motion designer for companies including Google and Apple, then turned to his own art full time in 2021. His short loops borrow from retro video games such as Super Mario, with small cartoon characters walking, jumping and tumbling through everyday scenes.

In March 2021 he began LetsWalk, setting out to animate 100 characters walking, and finished the hundredth walk in October 2022 after more than 550 days. Its closing piece, LetsWalk Finale 1/1, gathers all 100 walkers in one frame and opened Sotheby's Natively Digital: Relics sale that November. In April 2022 the collector Cozomo de' Medici bought Life and Death, a loop about the human life cycle.

Christie's offered Self-Discovery in its onchain sale Cartography of the Soul in 2023, and sold Hands of Time, a 30-second video, in a New York day sale in May 2024. That work won the Moving Image category at the first Digital Art Awards, held at Phillips in London in 2025. With Avant Arte he released Love Ripples in 2024, an edition of 30 prints on mirrored metal, each paired with an animated NFT.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Busan included his work in its 2024 BusanMoCA Platform exhibition. In March 2026 Art Basel Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Tourism Board projected his animation DeePle The People onto the Hong Kong Club Building each night, while AOTM Gallery showed his work at the fair.