Bangkok illustration fair 2025

SHOWCASE

/ ARTIST / 2025

ARTIST:	DOK
COUNTRY:	Korea, Republic of
EMAIL:	usernamedok@naver.com
CONTACT:	https://www.instagram.com/username.dok https://x.com/usernamedok
Hello, I'm DOK. I do hand-drawn illustrations with a black pen drawing on white paper, and color them digitally. The works are inspired by a lot of things, but especially my own memories of growing up as a former florist's child, poems I read and things I've seen. And these 10 artworks below were drawn between last year and quite recently.

DOK

This work shows various toxic plants(poppies, hemlocks, hellebore, gloriosa, arisaema, etc.) in a vase. 'DOK' is a shortened name of mine, but it is also pronounced the same as 'poison' in Korean.

Comfort

A Slice of Cake

Plum Blossoms

The works n.4-6 are from "Classic Seasonal Flowers in Korea", a series about long-loved flowers with Korean history, myths and shamanism, and traditional culture.

Plum blossom signifies the beginning of spring through a cold. The artists of the Joseon(a former Korean kingdom) era used to have gatherings under plum trees at night to drink some alcohol and enjoy the blossoms.

Tree Peonies

The tree peony was called the king of flowers and represented power and wealth. Korean people often embroidered tree peonies on bridal gowns at weddings and painted them on folding screens in palaces. In Korean shamanism, it is also the flower most cherished by the gods and most feared by ghosts due to its large size and splendor.

Jjille flowers

Barely hump's wild rose.

*the lean time during the late spring to early summer before the barley harvest.

If Teardrops were Pearls

Cold Flowers

I'll be home for Christmas

Helle in a Landscape

A pitch-black midday sea at the moment of a total solar eclipse.
Inspired by the story of Helle from Greek mythology, who fell into the sea and drowned while fleeing from parental abuse with her brother Phrixos on a golden ram.

BKKIF ARTIST SPECIAL

More Artwork/Merchandise:

September's Jogakbo

I sewed some subjects that I'd drawn a few times but didn't think were good enough to show, and turned them into a single image.

Jogakobo, a traditional Korean patchwork, generally means a bojagi(wrapping cloth) or clothes created with collected scraps of fabric left over from making hanbok, but I had already thrown away my drawings and couldn't sew, so I drew them like this.
On the other hand, just like my ancestors, who carefully collect scraps of fabric and decorate their children's clothes hoping they may have a long and fortunate life, I thought that one day I would make a great artwork if I worked hard on the small details, too.

Late Summer

While I drew this work, I thought about several poems about summer that I like, and especially the first sentence of Herman Hesse's 'September' popped up in my mind.
—
The garden mourns,
the rain sinks cool into the flowers.
Summer shudders
silently towards its end.

Leaf by golden leaf
drips down from the tall acacia tree.
Summer smiles in surprisedly and dimly
into the dying garden dream.

He pauses for a long time by the roses,
longing for rest.
Slowly he closes his big
tired eyes.

"Can the fishes see it's snowing?"

The quote from 'Child's Christmas in Wales', a short nostalgic story by Dylan Thomas.

I wanted to paint a picture of two swimming tropical fish, Bettas (Siamese fighting fish), under the marine snow, a biogeochemical phenomenon where dead plankton or whales and some organic matter decomposes into small flakes that seem like white snow and sink to the depths of the sea.
And since it's practically impossible for a freshwater fish like a betta to see the marine snow falling, I struggled with the idea itself before drawing this image. But if it's Christmas, you can dream that something special—something you can barely imagine on an ordinary day—might happen.