By @JustinWetch

Cem Hasimi's mother was a kindergarten teacher, which meant unlimited supplies. Watercolors, finger paint, crayons, homemade Play-Doh that was safe enough to eat. He and his brother would sculpt little characters out of it and make them fight. He drew war paintings during the Iraq war, tiny choppers and tanks and soldiers arranged across sheets of paper. He drew Superman on everything. He filled pages with patterns of bunnies, hundreds of them, one color, obsessive repetition for no reason he could explain.

He grew up in Yalova, a small seaside village near Istanbul where you could bike anywhere and see chickens behind people's houses. It was safe and slow. Then his family moved to Ankara, the capital, and safe became relative. He won second place in a local art competition around seven. Then, for reasons he can't quite name, he stopped painting for nearly a decade.

Between the kid who drew compulsively and the adult who would build LED sculptures for Saatchi Gallery, there's a long stretch of not making things, of the instinct going quiet before it came back louder.

He started university studying economics. It felt wrong immediately. While enrolled, he was working at a bar in Taksim, the busy, creative heart of Istanbul, and he couldn't stop drawing on napkins. Scribbles, figures, whatever came to mind. People at the bar noticed. They asked why he wasn't in art school. He didn't have an answer, so he went.

Painting lasted one year. It wasn't for him. Graphic design lasted four. It was. Not because he loved the discipline for its own sake, but because graphic design is communication through symbols, and Cem has never been good at communicating with words. The degree taught him to think in concepts, to package ideas, to say something without having to explain it out loud.

"I wasn't good at communication with people," he says. "Graphic design taught me to use symbolism and push myself to create concepts. That taught me a lot."

He was offered an internship at an advertising agency in his third year and took it because he was twenty-six, too old to be a student without income, and his family was pushing him toward a job. Art director was close enough to artist. Advertising people were rock stars back then, he says, hanging out, working late nights. It sounded great. Fifteen years later, it felt more like a burden. But advertising taught him how to take a conceptual package and deploy it across different mediums, digital, traditional, whatever. He never saw a difference between them. He still doesn't.

He moved to London with his wife because Turkey felt flat and they wanted three dimensions. London didn't hand him anything at first, but it gave him the environment to evolve. His W1 Curates exhibition, about migration and what it felt like to arrive in a new city, was the first time the gallery told him people actually watched the show instead of running to the bar for drinks.

There is a figure in Cem's work that walks. It walks through voids, through particle fields, through dark minimalist spaces where light is the only other presence. The figure is spare, almost a scribble, a hoodie or a simple line drawing, always in motion, always alone but surrounded by something.

The figure is him. Not metaphorically. Literally.

"There is a nonstop working small guy in my brain," Cem says. "It never stops. It always walks, goes to some weird places, and I can't control it."

He's quiet in person. Easygoing, slow-talking, not a rushy person, his words. But inside, the opposite. His brain rushes constantly, ideas and anxieties and emotions colliding, and the walking figure is an honest portrait of that gap between exterior calm and interior chaos. He promised himself early on that he would always work with motion or something that refers to motion. It's not a strategy. It's just what's true.

When he drills into why, he lands on anxiety. Motion is honest because he has never been still internally. The figure keeps walking because Cem keeps thinking, and making art is how the noise becomes something he can look at and understand. He talks to the artwork. The artwork talks back. That's how he communicates with himself.

"I feel better when I do art," he says. "I feel much better when I am surrounded by my art, because it communicates with me more."

Fifteen years as an art director means Cem has seen every kind of art. He's worked with countless artists, scrolled through every visual trend before most people noticed them. The saturation made him hard to impress, but it also made him allergic to repetition. When glitch art exploded because XCOPY did it so well, everyone started making glitch art. Cem experimented with it too, but only to use the technique at a single tiny point in a composition, not the way everyone else was using it. He wanted to take the known tool and deploy it differently.

"I just wanted to see something different than I would see everywhere," he says. "That's why I'm calling them artistic inventions."

He coined the phrase during our conversation and then committed to it. It's not about saving humanity. It's about refusing to make something that already exists. His art director reflexes and graphic design training are the engine: here's a technique, how do I use it in a way no one expects?

The work follows emotion. He never painted flowers or landscapes until his daughter was born and he felt like he was running through a flower field, excited, frightened, falling down, jumping around, not knowing what to do but overwhelmed with happiness. That became his SuperRare exhibition. When he's dark, the work goes dark. The content shifts, but the instinct stays the same: get what's happening inside out through whatever medium serves it.

And the mediums are genuinely whatever serves it. Pointillist painted environments with hand-drawn frame-by-frame figures. Particle animations built in Looom. Midjourney for transitions between scenes. After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, iPad for scribbling, Ableton for sound. Physical sculptures cast from 3D prints. He doesn't distinguish between digital and traditional tools the same way he doesn't distinguish between digital and traditional art. It's all just making.

When Saatchi Gallery invited him to show, they offered screens. Cem said no. Screens weren't right for that space. He proposed sculpture instead, despite never having made one.

The idea came from his own visual language. He'd always used particles as a communication tool in his digital work, dots connecting figures to environments, so he wondered if light could do the same thing physically. He researched LEDs, found electricians, drew them crude scribbles of what he wanted, and together they built a system: 3D-printed hoodie figures with programmable LEDs embedded inside, the light cascading down through the form, colors shifting to express different emotional states. Anger pulses one way. Love moves another. The cables hide under the pedestal. The technology disappears into the sculpture.

"I was flying," he says. "First time I tried sculpture, and people were fascinated watching it. Most of the kids were loving it."

That first show led to more. He made three sculptures for Saatchi, then moved pieces to SuperRare exhibitions, then New York, then Miami Art Basel. Each installation required reinvention, new problems to solve, new ways to integrate digital light into physical form. Making sculptures is not easy. Moving them around the world is harder. You have to love what you do enough to figure out the logistics every single time.

He calls the results integrated art: physical objects with digital souls. The big galleries don't want screens on walls anymore, they want presence, objects that occupy space. Cem builds things that do both, that stand in a room and glow with the same restless motion that drives everything he makes on a laptop.

Cem has a sculpture heading to Istanbul for Digital Art Week in June, with more in the works that he can't discuss yet.

Artists inspiring him lately: @ALCrego_, who Cem describes as a crazy motherfucker in the best possible sense. And @FEELSxart, whose abstract motion work he admires deeply.

What does Cem wish people understood? That he's been more influential than he gets credit for. Other artists have built on ideas he pioneered, and he'd like that acknowledged. He's not bitter about it. He just wants the line drawn clearly.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @cemhah recommends @Xer0x_XYZ, Al Crego, and Feels.