From provocative sculptures to digitally manipulated bodies, the London-based multidisciplinary artist is turning the visual language of Gen Z into a universe of her own.
An axe disguised as a pair of heels. A bright pink hookah transformed into a stripper shoe. A female body decorated with the familiar shapes of fidget spinners. At first glance, the work of London-based multidisciplinary artist and art director Sasha Sergeeva (professionally known as Sashaareyouok) feels like something pulled from the stranger corners of the internet, where fashion, humour, sexuality, and absurdity collide.
But behind the playful imagery lies a broader artistic ambition: to build an entire world that exists somewhere between the digital and the physical, reflecting the culture of a generation whose identities have developed alongside the internet.
Originally from Siberia and now based in London, Sasha works across photography, sculpture, digital art, and design, drawing inspiration from the visual codes, everyday objects, and cultural references that shape contemporary life. Rather than treating these disciplines as separate practices, she brings them together under SASHAAREYOUOK, an evolving artistic universe in which each work contributes to a larger narrative.
“I’m a girl from a small city in Siberia, and I think that already tells you a lot about my personality,” she explains. “My mother is an extremely talented artist, and I’ve been surrounded by her creative influence since I can remember myself, which gave me a strong foundation and direction.”
Growing up, art provided an outlet for her imagination, while the internet offered a window onto a world far beyond her immediate surroundings. Her mother’s work as a clothing designer and tailor introduced her to the possibilities of creative expression, and Sasha soon found herself drawn towards experimenting with different mediums.
“Growing up, art and the internet became my escape. My surroundings didn’t necessarily reflect what I wanted from life or where I saw myself going, so I was always looking beyond them and exploring what existed elsewhere through digital culture.”
It was within this combination of artistic experimentation and online exploration that Sasha began developing the visual language that would eventually define her practice. Even her artistic identity emerged from internet culture. Originally an Instagram username she adopted at sixteen, Sashaareyouok references the Russian meme “Sanya, are you okay?”, with Sanya being a colloquial variation of Sasha.
“The name grew with me and stuck because there was so much room to play with it and have fun. Now, there’s a whole digital world growing around it.”
Today, that world functions as both an artistic identity and an open-ended creative environment. “SASHAAREYOUOK is a playground for me and my work,” she explains. “I’m creating it through an inner-child lens, and it’s a world of contradictions between adulthood and play. It’s also a space for exploring identity through self-portraiture and transforming the body into objects across different mediums, which is an important part of my artistic practice.”
For Sasha, the internet is more than a platform for displaying finished work. It is where much of that world begins, providing an endless stream of images, references, ideas, and possibilities for experimentation. Her practice embraces this exchange between online and offline life, questioning what happens when familiar cultural symbols are removed from their original contexts and transformed into something else.
Unlike artists who position themselves at a critical distance from popular culture, Sasha has little interest in pretending to exist outside the digital environment that informs her generation’s aesthetic sensibilities.
“I’m not afraid of embracing things that are mainstream or admitting that I love trends that my generation connects with. I don’t feel the need to distance myself from them,” she says. “I’m not just observing a culture that exists around me; I’m part of it, and I’m building it.”
That philosophy took on a more tangible form in September 2026, when she presented SASHAAREYOUOK — ART SHOW at London’s Koppel Collective. Curated by Sasha herself, the three-day exhibition brought together her own work alongside contributions from Mattia Cilurzo, Ione Guerra, and Nataliya Belova.
Conceived as a physical extension of the SASHAAREYOUOK universe, the exhibition combined photography, digital imagery, sculptures, and everyday objects in a space designed to encourage unexpected connections between the body, fashion, identity, and internet culture.
“To build an impactful digital world, it’s important to give people the opportunity to experience it beyond the screen,” Sasha explains. “Art can exist digitally and have a massive impact, but there’s something irreplaceable about making it tangible, immersing viewers in the world and creating a space for human connection.”
For Sasha, the exhibition represented an opportunity to transform something previously experienced primarily through images into a shared physical environment.
“I wanted it to feel like stepping into an already existing Instagram feed, but in real life.”
The participating artists each introduced a different perspective. Mattia Cilurzo’s wearable sculptures explore bodily transformation and vulnerability, while Ione Guerra’s digital tattoo works revisit imagery associated with the 2010s. Nataliya Belova’s multidisciplinary practice examines pop culture and the relationship between public and private spaces. Together, their work expanded the exhibition beyond Sasha’s individual artistic language, creating a shared environment shaped by overlapping cultural references.
Among the most striking pieces were Axe Heels and Hookah Stripper Heels, two 2026 collaborations between Sasha and Mattia Cilurzo. Both transform recognisable objects into sculptural hybrids, blending the aesthetics of high heels with unexpected materials and functions. They sit somewhere between fashion accessories, absurdist design, and contemporary sculpture, challenging the distinction between objects intended to be worn, used, or simply looked at.
“The idea for Hookah Stripper Heel had been in my head for around two years before I made the first prototype in January 2026 (featured on my @sashaareyouok Instagram). I then had the pleasure of redesigning it together with Mattia Cilurzo, transforming the concept into a sculptural art piece for its second version. For me, stripper heels are an iconic tool of self-expression. They’re the heels I feel most comfortable and confident in when I want to feel strong and empowered. I find it fascinating that, despite their provocative appearance, they’re also the most stable heels I’ve ever worn. The hookah takes me back to when I was around 15 or 16, growing up in my hometown in Siberia and spending my free time with friends, buying and smoking it illegally. I remember that period as the beginning of my independence and a journey towards understanding myself and growing into who I am. Bringing these two objects together felt like merging different versions of myself: the hookah represents an earlier chapter of my life, while the stripper heel reflects how I express myself today. Despite belonging to different stages of my personal development, both connect to ideas of identity, self-expression, adulthood, and play.”
Elsewhere, works such as Spinner Thong and Bikini turn their attention towards the female body and its representation in digital culture. In Spinner Thong, the imagery of fidget spinners is placed over an intimate part of the body, bringing together a recognisable internet-era object and a visual language associated with sexuality and display. Bikini, a collaboration with Ione Guerra, uses digital tattoo imagery to explore the body as a surface onto which cultural symbols can be projected.
“Our collaborative pieces explore the female body as a canvas for self-expression, using playful elements like tattoos and spinners to challenge the way we perceive it,” Sasha explains. “I’m interested in how reconnecting with your inner child allows you to see the body as a playground for exploration and self-expression, rather than through the lens of adult associations and objectification.”
These works invite questions about how femininity, sexuality, and self-expression are constructed through images. Their playful appearance leaves room for more complicated interpretations: are familiar symbols being reclaimed, exaggerated, or simply rearranged until their original meanings begin to shift?
That ambiguity is part of what makes Sasha’s practice interesting. Her work frequently occupies the space between seemingly opposing ideas: masculine and feminine, innocence and provocation, perfection and imperfection, humour and seriousness. Rather than resolving these tensions, she allows them to coexist.
“I think I’m a person full of contradictions, and consciously or unconsciously, the art I make carries those qualities,” she says. “I believe things are never black and white, and that something can be playful and absurd while still raising serious questions about identity and representation.”
Her approach feels particularly connected to the visual culture of Gen Z, where irony and sincerity often overlap, and where a single image can function simultaneously as a joke, a fashion statement, a form of personal expression, and a commentary on the culture that produced it.
For Sasha, however, the internet’s influence extends beyond aesthetics. She sees it as fundamentally connected to the way younger generations construct and continuously redefine their identities.
“We’re almost like shape-shifters, and I find it fascinating how quickly we can reconstruct our identities and explore different versions of who we are.”
She believes this fluidity extends to creative expression itself, challenging the expectation that an artist, or an individual, must remain within a fixed identity or discipline. Yet that freedom comes with its own contradictions. Social media offers opportunities for self- expression while simultaneously exposing individuals to endless comparisons, expectations, and pressures to conform.
“I think the toxic side of digital culture is that we’re so exposed to other people that we start feeling like we’re in this imaginary competition, constantly comparing ourselves and questioning our own abilities,” she explains. “But the world isn’t on a budget, as we’ve been saying online for a while. There’s no limit to opportunities, and there’s space for everyone.”
Rather than viewing digital culture as inherently restrictive, Sasha approaches it with a distinctly optimistic outlook. Even the most superficial online trends, she argues, can create genuine opportunities for human connection.
“And even if a community is built entirely around one trend, why not? It’s still a community.”
That openness also informs her understanding of what happens to an artwork once it enters the digital world. Images can be shared, appropriated, reinterpreted, and detached from their original contexts almost immediately. Rather than resisting this unpredictability, Sasha sees it as an essential part of contemporary creative culture.
“I think I see the internet as an ecosystem built on co-creation, where something you put out into the world can reach places you never imagined, be reinterpreted, repurposed and influence culture in completely unexpected ways.”
Yet there is an interesting contradiction at the centre of this process. Online culture moves at extraordinary speed, constantly generating and discarding new visual trends. By translating elements of that culture into physical objects and exhibitions, Sasha is giving them another kind of existence, one that can be encountered outside the endless movement of the screen.
Her recent exhibition raised precisely this question: what changes when something created within the visual language of the internet becomes an object occupying real space?
Part of the answer lies in the freedom of her multidisciplinary approach. Photography allows her to manipulate how bodies and objects are represented, while sculpture introduces material, weight, and physical presence. Digital artwork makes it possible to transform familiar images without being restricted by the logic of the physical world.
For Sasha, however, the medium is ultimately secondary to the idea.
“I think my creative process always starts with a finished and defined artwork in my head. But once I start creating it, it goes through so much redevelopment that sometimes the entire form changes from what I originally imagined,” she explains. “For me, the idea itself is always superior to any specific medium I initially imagine it in.”
That fluidity reflects a broader shift in contemporary creative culture, where the boundaries between fine art, fashion, design, and digital media are increasingly difficult to define. Sasha’s work exists comfortably within these overlaps, borrowing from different disciplines without treating their traditional distinctions as limitations.
There is, however, a difference between reproducing the aesthetics of internet culture and saying something meaningful about them. The challenge for a practice so closely connected to contemporary visual trends is to move beyond their immediate recognisability and reveal something about the identities, desires, and contradictions they contain.
Sasha’s most compelling works open up that possibility by making familiar things feel unfamiliar. A shoe becomes an axe. A childhood toy becomes part of an image of the sexualised body. An object that might otherwise disappear into the visual noise of social media is transformed into something that demands a second look.
At the same time, building an identifiable artistic universe brings its own challenges. Ina culture where visibility often depends on maintaining a consistent aesthetic, how does an artist remain recognisable without becoming creatively restricted?
It’s a question Sasha is particularly conscious of. “I’m trying not to build a box for myself that I’ll eventually suffocate in.”
While she recognises the importance of a strong visual identity, she is equally aware of the risks involved in allowing that identity to become too rigid.
“The danger is when your visual language restricts you rather than evolves with you. If it’s truly authentic and comes from within you, you’ll naturally evolve with it.”
The experience of curating her first exhibition appears to have reinforced that desire for continued evolution. Beyond presenting her own work, Sasha discovered an enthusiasm for creating opportunities for other artists and building connections beyond the screen.
“Being a curator for this exhibition, rather than only an artist, made me realise how fulfilling it is to give other creatives a platform to showcase their work. I want to continue creating opportunities for artists to exhibit and collaborate with me on future projects.”
The significance of SASHAAREYOUOK — ART SHOW* may therefore extend beyond the exhibition itself. It represents an attempt to give a growing digital universe a physical presence, while inviting other artists and audiences to participate in its development.
“For me, this was a starting point,” Sasha says. “I want to keep expanding this world into physical spaces, creating new artworks and authentic experiences that make it increasingly tangible. I want people not just to observe the SASHAAREYOUOK world I’m building, but to become part of it, interact with it and co-create.”
And perhaps that is the most interesting aspect of SASHAAREYOUOK: rather than simply documenting a generation shaped by the internet, Sasha is attempting to construct an artistic language from within it, turning the images, objects, and contradictions of contemporary digital life into a world of her own.
A world whose future depends not on remaining the same, but on its capacity for reinvention.
As Sasha puts it, “That’s how you build an artistic universe that can grow with you without ever becoming a limitation.”