EP15｜From Styling Design to Social Impact — Kyla Artist Prize laureate Lee Dong-hao on The Great Artist, reinventing the visual arts through make-up

Gold Award in the make-up category of the 2025 Kyla Artist Prize: the creative metamorphosis of a pioneer at the crossing of fashion and art

[Taipei] In Episode 15 of The Great Artist, the podcast presented by DE Global Art Agency, listeners are led into the creative world of Lee Dong-hao, exploring how he has metamorphosed from a styling designer into an artist possessed of social influence. As a pioneer at the crossing of fashion and art, Lee Dong-hao leads, with a singular aesthetic vision, the profound union of styling design and the visual arts.

What makes Lee Dong-hao's creation so moving is the way he elevates "make-up" — a craft often regarded as merely a service — into an artistic language capable of bearing social issues and cultural value. He has not only risen to prominence within the international fashion world, but has continually pondered how to convey, through his art, a deeper social concern and cultural reflection. In his view, style has never been merely outward adornment, but a way of expressing a point of view, a way of influencing the world.

In this episode, Lee Dong-hao looks back upon his creative journey — from his earliest work in image make-up, to how he later came to convey social issues and cultural value through his art. He shares his singular understanding of "style", and explores how, within the discourse of contemporary art, one may influence a broader audience through styling and visual aesthetics. Behind this transformation, from a styling artist behind the scenes to an artist before the stage, lies his ceaseless questioning of and breakthrough beyond the very essence of art.

Lee Dong-hao was recently awarded the Gold Award in the make-up category of the 2025 Kyla Artist Prize; this recognition from the international stage further attests to his outstanding achievement in the fields of art and design. This episode delves into the conception of his prize-winning work, and into how this international award became a pivotal turning point in his passage from styling behind the scenes to art before the stage, and in his advancing of dialogue between art and society. The Kyla Artist Prize encourages artists to pioneer new creative thinking and to advance dialogue between art and society, and Lee Dong-hao is among the finest practitioners of this spirit.

For all creators who yearn to break through the frameworks of their profession, Lee Dong-hao's story is a deeply inspiring exemplar. He proves that between fields seemingly clearly bounded there lie, in truth, boundless crossover possibilities; and that a true creator can always find, beyond the existing framework, a wholly new world of his own.

That the Kyla Artist Prize infuses creators with the twofold credibility of the academy and the market is precisely the concrete practice of the academic legitimacy and international career that The Great Artist champions. Lee Dong-hao reinvents the boundaries of the visual arts through make-up, and influences the world through his art, writing a vivid annotation to this spirit.

The Great Artist EP15 is now available on Apple Podcasts, SoundOn and other platforms, with a running time of approximately 28 minutes. Listeners are warmly invited to experience how Lee Dong-hao opens up wholly new possibilities for art through make-up.