They flow ceaselessly through the text panels on our smartphones, these ubiquitous ideograms used to convey facts or feelings or perhaps nothing at all. They have come to infiltrate both our memes and our dreams. They appeared on Nippon Telegraph and Telephone mobile devices in the ‘90s, went global when Apple made them standard on iPhones and have become so universal that Sony has turned them into an animated movie. And now emoji, it seems, is a medium for fine art.

1. Digital artist Yung Jake scores
with emoji portraits
They flow ceaselesslythrough the text panels on oursmartphones,these ubiquitous
ideograms used to convey facts or feelings orperhaps nothing at all. They have come to
infiltrate both ourmemes and ourdreams.They appeared on Nippon Telegraph and
Telephone mobile devices in the ‘90s, wentglobalwhen Apple made them standard on
iPhones and have become so universalthat Sony has turned them into an animated movie.
And nowemoji, it seems,is a medium for fine art.
That is how the Los Angeles creator Yung Jake (realname:Jake Patterson) has come to
use them, creating a showof appealinglyretrograde three-dimensional“Emoji Portraits” that
opened atthe Tripoli Gallery in Southampton,NY, the week during which — tragic but true -
hardly anyone celebrated the red-letter non-eventof World Emoji Day (July 17).

2. Depicting celebrities like Justin Bieber, Leonardo DiCaprio,WillowSmith and Kim
Kardashian West(with strawberry lips and Magic 8 Ball eyes), Yung Jake’s paintings are
sprightly renditions of digital images he began making in 2015 with an application developed
by Vince McElvie, a business partnerand friend. Using emoji.ink as his tool, Yung Jake
found he could “paint” pointillist portraits assembled from hundreds ofgoofy images of
movie cameras,rabbits, moons,clouds,smiley faces, honeypots and,yes, poop.
“I just happened to be good at it, so I did a bunch ofcelebrities Latest TechnologyNews,”
Yung Jake said in a text message,his preferred form of communication.“I senta lot to my
famous friends knowing they’d post.”
Sometime YouTube rapper,sometime art-world darling,sometime digital explorer,Yung
Jake was raised,as he claimed,in “Bridgehampton,Bali, Sag Harborand NewZealand”
(“we travelled around a lot growing up cause my family surfed,” he wrote) and educated at,
among otherplaces,Bridgehampton High School.
He attended the California Institute of the Arts, from which he graduated in 2012,taking with
him the Yung Jake persona he had begun developing in 2011 with music videos like

3. “Unfollow.” In it, wearing pink pants and a buckethat, he raps in a drowsymonotone about
unfollowing an ex on socialmedia. The video gained some traction on the art world circuit,
and in the years since, he has emerged as one among a crop ofcompelling millennialartists
whose digital works are developed almostentirely for oron the internet.
Still, while his augmented reality artwork “Datamosh” was a buzzyhit at the digital salon of
the 2013 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, it is the emoji pictures that have brought
Yung Jake a measure ofmainstream attention. In January,a booth dedicated to those
images at the Zona Maco contemporaryartfair in Mexico City sold out; less than a week
after his newshowopened atthe Tripoli Gallery, all butfour of the 13 emoji paintings were
accounted for.