Inspired by strangers' dreams, Moho builds glittering, slightly unsettling worlds

"A dream is something we've experienced, yet it can be difficult to explain, and even the memory of it changes after we wake up," says Moho, who has built an entire practice around that slipperiness.

Hundreds of strangers have now sent their dreams through an online form, from a boy who finds an ocean beneath his bed to a shepherd who strings constellations across the night and a mermaid who gives away a single scale and then weeps gemstones. Moho turns each one into a short video where pastel velvet, pearls and sequins glow against deep blue skies, and a small amount of strangeness always sits inside the beauty.

Moho's name comes from the Korean word mohohada, meaning "to be ambiguous", and dreams seemed the most ambiguous subject available. Reading other people's recounts of their dreams revealed a pattern. "What interested me most was that they weren't simply beautiful," Moho says. "A beautiful scene might carry unease or strangeness, while a frightening story might feel unexpectedly tender." The work lives in that overlap, where a pink, porcelain-like face holding a swirling ice cream cone can suggest both mischief and grief at once.

Moho grew up in a small city in South Korea and now works from Seoul. A degree in media art taught Moho to use technology to express a private world, followed by a spell as a new media planner while the creative practice kept running alongside.

There are two sentences that a professor said to Moho which still guide their work today. The first was: "Use technology, but don't let the audience notice it. Before their eyes, technology should become magic." And the second: "Even something as simple as lighting a small bulb can create a remarkable world." Moho applies that same thinking to AI, one of the tools used in the studio today. "I hope viewers can feel, even for a moment, that the world in my work actually exists."

When making one of the pieces, each starts with a dream and a key visual, before Moho spends a good effort hunting for the right texture. "My criterion is whether a scene comes to mind as I read it," the artist explains, and the chosen image then has to find its material.

"The same form can evoke very different feelings depending on what it appears to be made of." Moho plays around with glass, jewels, tulle and fur until one of them matches the mood, and then the story will grow around that image, with plans kept loose on purpose because "something I discover while making one image often leads to the next one". Along the way, Moho keeps checking "whether everything belongs to the same world and whether the feeling that first drew me to the dream is still there."

Dream of a Little Seahorse is where that approach clicked. Moho wanted a story that showed the world of Moho in a single image, and landed on a seahorse that looks fragile and out of place underwater, so it dreams of flying. In the finished video, a jewel-studded seahorse in pearly pink and yellow rises from a ribbon of crystal water into a blue sky, while elsewhere a tiny version of the creature floats between snarling, sharp-toothed fish.

"I used glass-like textures throughout the video. That fragility, the feeling that something could break at any moment, seemed to reflect the nature of dreams and ambiguity." Before this, Moho's work looked mostly like 2D illustration. "Making this video helped me realise how well these textures suited dreams, and it changed the overall visual direction of my work." And it also introduced Moho to a wider audience.

Look Back at Myself comes from Moho's own sleep during the years of working at an office job, where the artist felt trapped. In the dream, a bird perched inside the subway, and Moho thought, "I wish I could be that bird". Then came the plot twist: "I realised the bird was me." The artwork shows a pale dove on a dark pole, and a crowd of suited, downcast commuters in grey with one white-faced woman in black among them. "The self that felt trapped and the self that was free existed at the same time. It made me think that this free self had been within me all along, but I had been keeping it confined."

Elsewhere, a comet with a veiled tail falls towards a coral tree that has eyes, a swan made of pink tulle and stars crossed the night, and a boy in a sequinned suit hugs his knees among flowers. They appear familiar but also uncanny, similar to the feeling of dreaming – not knowing if you're awake, asleep, or if you're the character in the plot. "If someone encounters an unfamiliar scene in my work and thinks, 'I know this feeling', I think a connection can form between us, even if our experiences are different," says Moho. "I hope my work can give those things we haven't been able to name a place to stay, where we can look at them together."