Yaeji was born in Flushing, Queens and lived in New York with her parents till she was 5. They moved around a lot, first to Long Island, then to Atlanta. As she entered third grade, fearing their daughter was becoming too Americanized, Yaeji’s family moved back to South Korea; her father, who once played in heavy metal bands, was particularly wary of American pop music, going as far as to censor the Pussycat Dolls from his young daughter. Eventually, Yaeji made it back to the States when she enrolled in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University to study painting and conceptual art. She also got involved in college radio, where she was exposed to electronic music for the first time and picked up an interest in DJing and producing.

In NYC after school, she still wasn’t sure if she wanted to enter the art world or devote herself to music. By day she hustled as an artist assistant and later as a graphic designer; after work, she would upload songs to SoundCloud and head out to shows every night, taking in the city’s next generation of underground dance music producers. “The music really engulfed me,” she says.

Though she recently quit her graphic design job to concentrate on her increasingly popular songs—the video for recent single “Drink I’m Sippin On” is closing in on two million YouTube views—she hasn’t given up on visual art. During a visit to her painting studio in Bushwick, she shows me some of her work. “I was listening to witch house and had broken up with an ex when I was painting this,” she says with a laugh, looking at a mass of intricate, aggressive black lines on white canvas. As the afternoon light streams into the studio, and we consider her paintings, she asks if she can make me curry one of these days.