Pop Goes The Artist: 10 Local Graphic Designers to Add To Your Radar

These Malaysian graphic designers deserve a place in your follow list.

Ejin Sha (@ejinsha)

Ejin Sha’s art tends to resist a fixed style; she is instead guided by curiosity and a need to make sense of things, such as relationships, histories, and identities that feel distant or difficult to hold. Each work becomes a kind of translation, moving between memory and form, presence and absence. She works across a wide range of materials, from mass-consumed surfaces like paper and tarpaulin to more intimate ones like clay and resin, and is often drawn to how materials carry cultural memory, especially those connected to display, ritual, and everyday life. Her latest project, Are You Living or Leaving? (created in collaboration with motoguo for Cloud Walkers at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023) and Celestial Mall for How Do We Shop at Singapore Design Week 2025 explores zhizha methodologies to recreate spaces as symbolic offerings, from aspirational domestic interiors (such as a living room in the clouds) to retail environments. Her parallel practice as a graphic designer helps shape her artistic thinking. Identity, to her, is never fixed, but performed, projected, and constantly renegotiated. That tension between preservation and invention is what drives her work forward.

Ilham Alshahab (@ilhamalshahab)

Ilham Alshahab is an artist whose art style lives somewhere between daydreaming and careful observation. She pays close attention to the world around her, focusing on the ordinary until it begins to feel symbolic. From that inner expansion, her work emerges.

Rather than committing to a single medium, Ilham lets the concept determine the material, moving fluidly between digital illustration, animation, print, and sculpture depending on what each idea requires. What distinguishes her work is its resistance to urgency. These are worlds built for slowing down, layered with metaphor and quiet detail, inviting viewers to observe rather than consume.

Valen Lim (@valenlim820)

Beyond the distinct, vibrant style of Valen Lim’s graphic design works, there’s another reason why we feel so drawn to them: they are a reflection of our culture. With his graphic design brand Valen Lim Studios, their work centres on the visual culture of growing up in Southeast Asia: old street signboards, vintage packaging, kopitiam colours, and a melting pot of culture that is Malaysia. Alongside influences from Hong Kong and Taiwanese media, these references are woven into their work in a way that is nostalgic yet fresh, and playful without losing intention. Graphic design is Lim’s studio’s main language, with an attention to craft and strong concepts. “The work feels expressive yet grounded and layered, yet well thought through,” he tells us.  

Shu Yee (@shuhuahua)

Shu is an artist who finds meaning in the ordinary, taking everyday objects and scenes and giving them a subtle twist that shifts perspective, inviting viewers to take a second look. Working across digital illustration, risograph print, and charcoal drawing, her practice is layered, subversive, and driven by curiosity. Her ideas rarely arrive all at once. Instead, they accumulate gradually through daily life, films, reading, sketching, and walking, until the fragments eventually connect. It’s a process she likens to David Lynch’s idea of “catching the fish”—the idea was already there, waiting to be noticed. What makes her work distinct is the way familiar subjects carry small contradictions; things that look recognisable at first glance, but reward closer attention.

Willwin Yang (@willwinyang)

Willwin Yang is an illustrator whose character-driven work explores modern womanhood, identity, and the quietly overwhelming experience of adulthood. Her work is immediately identifiable by its bold linework, pop colour palettes, and a pinch of nostalgia give her illustrations an immediately inviting quality. Yet, underneath the playfulness and puns lies something more intimate and deeply relatable. Working primarily digitally, her ideas often begin not with a visual, but with an emotional realisation that often surfaces during late nights, conversations with friends, or simply overthinking—something most of us know too well. From there, she builds imagery around a the truth that somehow feels universal. What makes her work resonate with most is the balance between humour and vulnerability. Look a little closer and you might just find a piece of yourself in it.

NAD (@nadramatiq_art)

Nadia is the artist behind Nadramatiq, presenting a creative world built on dramatic, playful, and vibrantly expressive characters. Her work draws from the boundless imagination of childhood: a well she’s been able to return to even more freely since becoming a mother, finding fresh wonder in the everyday through her child’s eyes.

She works digitally on iPad with Procreate, bringing her illustrations to life through quirky characters dressed in expressive costumes and larger-than-life emotions. The colour palette strikes a careful balance—slightly retro, neither too vivid nor too muted—creating a mood that feels both nostalgic and full of life.

Nurul Atika (@newruul)

Illustrator Nurul Atika is known for her sharp, clean comic line art set against contrasting pastel palettes. It is a combination so distinct that people can’t help but recognise her work the moment they spot it. Her illustrations lean into fantasy and melancholy, with a deeply personal thread running through most of her characters, many of whom share her signature micro bangs.

She works digitally using a seven-year-old Wacom tablet, loyal to the original setup that worked for her throughout these years. Inspiration tends to strike her while playing video games or watching a good film—she’s drawn to memorable details like clothing, hair, and character design. The impulse here is simple: she sees something she loves, and she wants to draw it. The result is work that blends clean, precise linework with macabre storytelling and a colour palette that’s unmistakably hers.

Vanissa Foo (@humana_art)

Vanissa Foo is the artist behind Humana, a creative practice built on bold, vector-based illustration that balances maximalism with graphic precision. Her work pulls you into playful, surreal worlds constructed from clean shapes and vibrant colour—it’s a fantasy world rendered with a designer’s eye. Inspiration tends to arrive in quiet, unexpected moments, such as flipping through a vintage picture book or simply when something random sparks an idea. What makes her work immediately recognisable is the signature combination of red and pink, a palette that feels bold and maximalist while staying grounded in simple geometric forms. It’s a balance that gives her illustrations a joyful, larger-than-life quality that’s difficult to turn away from.

Joey Wong (@dpeculiar.artist)

Joey Wong—or d’peculiar on Instagram—is an artist whose work occupies the uneasy space between the familiar and the strange. Faces, hands, and fragments of the human body are reconstructed into macabre scenarios that feel slightly unsettling yet playful. Working across digital illustration and canvas painting, both mediums inform one another in her practice, with the physical work bringing a tactility that complements her digital compositions. Ideas rarely arrive in a linear way for her: they come in quiet moments such as in the stillness before sleep, or when she observes something ordinary a little too long. What sets her work apart is restraint in the uncomfortable. Rather than leaning on shock, she builds tension through minimal compositions and unexpected imagery, letting discomfort arrive slowly, and linger.

This story first appeared on GRAZIA Malaysia’s March 2026 print issue.

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