MEET MIA LEE
Mia Lee is a Chicago-based visual artist who has recently made her name in various visual art forms. She splits her time between mural work, illustrations, graphic design, animation, and textiles. More recently, Mia Lee released some intriguing snippets and a trailer for her upcoming Adult Swim cartoon titled ‘Unwonderful World.’
Mia Lee was born and raised in the south side of Chicago, where the young artist became inspired by the raw and authentic visual art forms that filled the city walls and streets. In an interview with The Jam TV Show, Mia Lee spoke about how art always came naturally to her as she was born and brought up in a highly artistic household. Her mother was a makeup artist and painter, while one of her grandmothers was a seamstress and the other was a pianist.
The early influence of artistic women in her life has informed Mia Lee’s need to bring female voices and perspectives into the art world, which she believes has always been flooded with male perspectives.
Although she dabbles in many different visual art forms, her work has often been considered neo-expressionistic, which is the artistic style of abstractly portraying real-world objects and bodies, usually in a rough yet emotionally vivid way. The exaggerated forms and playful use of color, texture reveals an honest yet slightly veiled depiction of her internal world, without any hidden agenda or censorship.
Whether it be murals, graphic design, illustration, or textile work, her design features an intimate interplay between realism and cartoonism. Her work is recognizable by her chaotic use of shapes merged with a limited yet striking color palette. She has also become widely recognized for her textile work, which mostly features her chaotic use of shapes and her depictions of recognizable objects in abstract ways on satin cloth.
As a BIPOC female artist, Mia Lee is adamant about fostering the creative spirit of children from a very early age. She often speaks out about how making art is never about making money or being successful but about putting your own creative expression into the world. Her creative spirit has evolved throughout the years to go from mural and illustration work to what she calls graphic paintings.
Mia Lee’s graphic painting uses technology to digitally paint and bring animations to life in a manner that is neither an illustration nor an animated film. However, despite the uniqueness of her individual style, Mia Lee has also done work with Nike and Jordan and has even conducted cartoon and comic-making classes for kids in the south side of Chicago.
Her work on Adult Swim’s Unwonderful World has Mia Lee exploring a new way of putting her unique creative spirit out there, as she developed characters, a world, and even the script for the animated cartoon for adults. Here, she gets a chance to bring her style to the world of cartoon animation and storytelling, which we can only expect will take this budding Chicago artist to a whole new creative level.
