Digital artist Yung Jake scores with emoji portraits

I just happened to be good at it, so I did a bunch of celebrities: Yung Jake

They flow ceaselessly through the text panels on our smartphones, these ubiquitous ideograms used to convey facts or feelings or perhaps nothing at all. They have come to infiltrate both our memes and our dreams. They appeared on Nippon Telegraph and Telephone mobile devices in the ‘90s, went global when Apple made them standard on iPhones and have become so universal that Sony has turned them into an animated movie.

And now emoji, it seems, is a medium for fine art.

That is how the Los Angeles creator Yung Jake (real name: Jake Patterson) has come to use them, creating a show