Melih Çebi (b.1990) is based in İstanbul. 

Melih Çebi’s practice explores the tension between the external world and the internal landscapes it produces. His work considers how contemporary systems of consumption, technology, capitalism and digital culture shape the ways in which we understand ourselves, relate to one another, and experience our own inner lives.

Childhood remains an important point of departure in Çebi’s practice, but its role has gradually shifted. Where his earlier works approached difficult subjects through the eyes of a child, childhood has increasingly become a visual and psychological language rather than a fixed perspective. Cartoon-like figures, familiar characters, bright colours and an underlying sense of play remain present, yet the innocence they once suggested has become increasingly unstable. The perpetual smiles of his earlier characters now coexist with blank, expressionless faces—figures that appear less concerned with performing happiness and more suspended in a state of introspection, detachment or uncertainty.

This shift reflects a broader movement in Çebi’s practice from looking at the absurdities of the outside world toward questioning how those absurdities become internalised. Consumerism, late-stage capitalism, social media and the constant presence of digital technology are not treated simply as subjects of social critique. They become environments that shape desire, identity, memory and psychological states. The external world becomes an internal landscape.

Çebi is interested in the paradoxes created by this condition. Technology promises connection while producing new forms of isolation; consumer culture offers endless possibilities while generating dissatisfaction; social media allows individuals to constantly present themselves while making genuine intimacy increasingly difficult to locate. His recurring figures often occupy this ambiguous space between being watched and watching, participating and withdrawing, connecting and becoming isolated. In this sense, the question of identity is never entirely separate from the systems in which identity is constructed and performed.

The artist’s characters function simultaneously as personal and universal figures. Their repeated, almost interchangeable faces suggest that experiences we perceive as deeply personal—anxiety, alienation, desire, insecurity, loneliness—may be far more universal than we imagine. Rather than assigning a fixed meaning to these faces, Çebi allows them to operate as masks through which both the artist and the viewer can recognise themselves. His imagery moves between memory and imagination, waking life and the subconscious, personal mythology and shared cultural experience.

Humour and irony remain central to this process. Çebi often uses the visual language of the worlds he questions: the seductive colours, polished surfaces, familiar imagery and playful aesthetics associated with popular and consumer culture. His works do not simply reject this visual language; they inhabit it. Their attractiveness becomes part of the contradiction. The same surfaces that draw the viewer in can conceal feelings of unease, emptiness or disconnection underneath. In this way, the work occupies an intentionally unstable space between attraction and discomfort, innocence and darkness, sincerity and sarcasm.

This tension also informs Çebi’s expanding use of materials. Moving beyond his earlier reliance on acrylic, he now works across acrylic, oil paint, mixed media and epoxy. The synthetic, glossy qualities of epoxy in particular introduce another layer to his exploration of contemporary visual culture, creating surfaces that can feel simultaneously seductive, artificial and protective. Material becomes not only a means of constructing an image but another way of questioning the relationship between desire, surface and substance.

Ultimately, Çebi’s practice asks how much of the inner self remains untouched by the world that surrounds it. How does a person construct an identity within a culture that constantly asks them to consume, perform, connect and present themselves? Can one distinguish between what is genuinely personal and what has been shaped by the systems in which one exists? And when connection becomes constant, what does it mean to still feel alone?

Rather than offering definitive answers, Çebi uses his characters, symbols and shifting visual language to remain within these questions. His practice moves between the playful and the unsettling, the personal and the collective, the external world and the subconsciou searching for the places where they overlap.