TikTok isn’t all ballets and lip-sync, I discovered by chance while scrolling through the suggestion section, when I came across a simple video of a guy trying to finish a painting.
PQKEEM‘s TikTok profile has almost 500,000 followers and this made me think about how strange it is that on the youngest social network of all, content such as painting finds so many viewers. 

A strange combination of acrylic on canvas and social media, but not impossible. The secret of PQKEEM, a young digital media artist based in San Francisco, lies in his ability to portray the most melancholic and sad aspects of our contemporary world. Seeing them represented in a clean and bare way and noticing how thousands of people manage to reflect themselves in the images makes us feel less alone, part of a whole. 

Moreover, PQKEEM doesn’t just paint and share his work with his followers. Once he has finished a work, he animates it digitally, giving it an even more macabre and real air. Thanks to this insight, it is now possible to buy original canvases, prints of his works and even NFT versions on the OpenSea platform. 

PQKEEM’s experience shows how any art form can survive in the digital age and adapt to different audiences.