How did a dyslexic teenager from Toronto come to drape the world in her signature pastel haze and 35mm film grain? The answer unfolds across three floors of the Daelim Museum, nestled in Seoul’s fashionable Jongno district. From her early, sun-dappled portraits of her sister Anna and teenage friends to high-profile collaborations with BLACKPINK and Billie Eilish, fangirl offers a blueprint for the visual identity of a generation.
It’s a savvy bet for the Daelim: spotlighting an artist with a million-strong Instagram following guarantees a youthful crowd. And they came! Members of the chart-topping girl group NewJeans were spotted roaming the galleries.
The museum leans into Collins’s sensibility with immersive scenography: oversized analog prints, video installations, fashion artifacts, and music videos, all swathed in her dreamlike palette. This is not merely a survey of an Instagram-era starlet. The show’s lush, neon-drenched aesthetic belies a darker undercurrent. Beneath the sequins and sparkle, Petra Collins’s work doesn’t just reflect youth culture. It interrogates it.
A visual coming-of-age
The exhibition opens with Collins’s images circa early 2010s, in Toronto where Collins began taking photos as a disaffected 15-year-old. She was bored in photography class and unimpressed by art theory. “I was like, I don’t care!,” she would later admit. Her real education came from the pages of Vice, which she pored over at American Apparel. It was there she discovered Ryan McGinley’s radiant portraits of nude, unguarded youth, bounding through sunlit fields.
By a stroke of luck, McGinley invited her on a professional road trip. It changed everything. “I don’t know if Ryan knows this, but many of my lighting techniques come from him,” Collins acknowledges. “I don’t know if Ryan knows this but many of my lighting techniques come from him. Ryan’s more technical as a photographer than me. My interest in the medium really comes from film and I was self-taught until I passed through the School of Ryan McGinley. I learned so much from just being around him.”
His influence is unmistakable in the soft, candid light of her early portraits, and in the translucent glow of a redheaded boy she dubbed “The Little Prince.” Her friends, captured in reverie, their hair tousled and limbs tangled in tall grass, recall the visual language of McGinley’s sun-kissed liberation.
But the image that launched Petra Collin’s career, also featured in the Seoul exhibition, is of a different sort. Three of her sister’s friends sit on a bed, cigarette lit, caught in a moment of quiet melancholy. One immediately thinks of the Lisbon sisters in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides: teenage bedrooms as both sanctuary and danger zone.
Though shot in bright daylight, the photo is murky, as if filtered through memory. Like pages from a diary, the image is at once intimate, subversive, and unknowable. Her focus on the emotional interiors of young women invites comparison to Larry Clark’s unflinching adolescence, or the troubled tenderness of Nan Goldin.
Glitter and teenage gloom
“I’ve seen my camera take on many truths. And the truths that shocked me the most to see, were my own,” Collins has said. Her raw, unfiltered imagery struck a chord with an online community of young “fangirls”—many, like her, navigating a fraught relationship with their own bodies. Underneath the candy-colored sheen, her work explores darker terrain: substance use, sexuality, depression.
We see teenagers splayed across rumpled beds, bathed in fuchsia light; bodies entwined, faces distant. It’s no surprise that Collins, with her cinematic instincts, was tapped as artistic director for Euphoria before being abruptly dismissed. Her aesthetic, drenched in yearning and danger, predates the show’s teenage anguish.
Look closer, and violence simmers beneath the surface. “I left home when I was pretty young and was in a very abusive relationship. I wanted to leave this person but I didn’t have the money or anywhere to go,” Collins recalled. Her backstory is heavy: a father bankrupted by a failed hosiery business; a mother, a Hungarian refugee, battling bipolar disorder; dyslexia, eating disorders, the forced end of her dance aspirations after knee surgery.
Photography became her outlet. At 20, Petra Collins landed in New York, and within months was being commissioned by Gucci, Adidas, Apple, Marc Jacobs. Her visual style, a dreamy yet unvarnished femininity, was soon everywhere: Calvin Klein campaigns featuring diverse bodies, a Lynchian short film for COS, a wedding-themed shoot with Chloë Sevigny in gauzy tulle and garter belt for Evening Standard.
“My lens and my personality, it’s just fluid. The art isn’t just in one place,” Collins says. She brings the same ethereal glow to Lil Nas X’s angel-winged portrait for M le magazine du Monde, and to Young Thug, shirtless in a prayer pose for Interview. Even Cardi B, captured in soft focus, seems to inhabit the same world as Collins’s anonymous high school subjects.
But such success came at a cost. The one who helped define millennial aesthetics soon found herself consumed by it. The exhibition devotes a space to “Bikinigate”—the 2013 Instagram controversy where her account was deleted for posting an unshaven bikini selfie. Her public response, an op-ed, read: ““Censorship of female bodies represents the hate and distrust we have towards female bodies.” A feminist stand, and a moment of rupture.
Slaying the monster
That rupture marked a shift. In The Gaze, Collins deliberately places viewers in a voyeur’s stance: bruised bodies in dim corridors and locker rooms dare the observer to confront their own gaze. “I wanted people to feel uncomfortable looking at my images of young girls,” she said.
But discomfort, too, can be aestheticized. And commercialized. “It’s bizarre seeing it now—that what I created is now the aesthetic for any type of millennial product,” Collins told Highsnobiety. “When I was creating it, I felt I was doing something important, or something that would change the world. And so now, I’m like, ‘What the fuck kind of monster did I create?'”
That monster haunts the upstairs rooms of the exhibition. Like photographer Cindy Sherman or filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (The Substance), Collins pushes her images toward the grotesque and the uncanny. Her models sport reptilian scales. Teenagers are tied up like hostages. She takes a selfie in a coffin filled with fake flowers.
And then comes the climax: a photograph of a bedroom, engulfed in flames. A teenage girl’s sanctuary, consumed. It’s a symbolic gesture. An act of destruction, but also of liberation. Petra Collins burns down the world she built.
The exhibition ends with a preview of her first feature-length film, a body horror exploring the Internet’s dark side, conceived after she left New York for Los Angeles. “It’s a town built on fame. So it has this dark cloud,” she reflects.
Fame, she confesses, still unnerves her. “My relationship with my body is so fraught, and I don’t think that Instagram has made it any better.” The solution? Build a new world, image by image. “Any images that I create, I’m sort of creating this world that I wish was accepted in, or that I wish that I lived in,” she says.
And in doing so, Petra Collins becomes her own fangirl.
“fangirl,” is on view through December 31, at Daelim Museum, in Seoul, South Korea. Books by Petra Collins are available from Rizzoli Publishing.
