Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
Artist Mimi Leung has a gift for turning the banal, the oversimplified, even the horrific, into works of art suffused with colorful delight no less intellectual than they are positive.
Born in Hong Kong and raised in London, she credits her love of color in part to the boring grey uniforms that she was forced to wear in school. Her life’s path then took her through a rejection from Cambridge’s architecture program “for not displaying an ‘adequate ability to draw,’” a stint at the Royal College of Art, and a move to Australia’s Outback that “continue[s] to inspire my work on many levels.”
She has since relocated to Melbourne, and her client roster includes many big names looking for a touch of well-educated whimsy, like The New York Times, Nike, Lane Crawford, Vice magazine, AOL, and Nokia.
She’s recently collaborated with Tumblr artist and Daily Dot favorite MiRon on a mask mandala GIF, and the combination is every bit as strange and entrancing as you’d imagine. MiRon’s shimmering totemic mask in brutal black sits in the center of a spinning corona of bottles, leaves, tentacles, and gun barrels. You should probably be carded before even looking at it. Leung’s contribution leavens the menace while MiRon’s mask infuses the entire piece with a more explicitly morbid, edgier sensibility than Leung’s pieces typically display.
