Damilola “DAOK” Okhoya - Between Boxes and Beings
Loud Youth Projects is proud to introduce Between Boxes and Beings, a collection of selected works by Nigerian-born, UK-based artist Damilola “DAOK” Okhoya. Known for his densely populated compositions that oscillate between chaos and cohesion, DAOK conjures visual worlds teeming with stick-figure-like characters, rendered in fine white outlines and radiant colour fields. His scenes — pulsing with life, pattern, and social complexity — offer a deeply contemporary vision of what it means to live, move, and survive in systems both visible and invisible.
Emerging from Lagos and now living in Leeds, DAOK’s practice is informed by the structures that contain and shape us. The artist studied physics before becoming a full time artist — a training that quietly underpins his fascination with form, pattern, and systemic tension. His figures, often referred to as “Citizens,” cluster and tangle across the canvas like particles, like thoughts, like urban crowds: each defined and expressive, yet never entirely alone.
In Erasure (2022), we see this tension vividly: gestural, skeletal figures jostle for space on a layered canvas, their identities simultaneously asserted and overwritten with streaks of white graffiti. When Will We Become Humans (2023), painted after his move to the UK, depicts huddled, haunted forms asking for recognition — not just of presence, but of full humanity. In People of Earth I and II , DAOK’s golden outlines against a deep black background evoke scrolls, crowds, or constellations — a collective portrait in which no one is centered, yet no one is forgotten.
Despite the frequent density of his compositions, DAOK’s palette is buoyant. Polka dots, checkerboards, neon outlines, and pattern-on-pattern textures give his works a rhythm that feels musical. This is no accident: the artist cites hip-hop, Afrobeat, and dancehall as major influences — not just aesthetically, but philosophically. Like music, his paintings remix and loop. They hold space for contradiction: joy and exhaustion, humour and critique, figuration and abstraction.
His works have been exhibited in London, New York, Miami, Paris, Lagos, and Kingston. DAOK has been featured on CNN and BBC News, and his collectors span continents — from Hollywood actors to cultural institutions. In 2023, he was awarded the UK’s Global Talent Visa and now continues his practice from Leeds, preparing a new body of work exploring migration, adaptation, and interior life.
DAOK’s world is one of pattern and pressure, intimacy and interruption. It is a world where meaning accumulates — citizen by citizen, line by line — until the canvas becomes a living thing.
About the Artist
Damilola “DAOK” Okhoya (b.1989, Lagos, Nigeria) is a self-taught artist working across painting, sculpture, digital art, and photography. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. His work has been shown in the UK, USA, France, China, and Jamaica. Recent exhibitions include Humour as Black Experience (Chatham House, London), A Box Theory of Life (London), No Wahala (Kingston), and A History Untold (Signature African Art, London). His work resides in collections across Hong Kong, Dubai, Paris, New York, London, and more. He lives and works in Leeds, UK.