ARTIST DOSSIER / FILE TKB-081
Guatemalan visual artist and illustrator. Building psychedelic skulls with cosmic, and neo-mesoamerican themes.
TOKEBI is the artistic alias of Bernal Aguilar, a Guatemalan visual artist and illustrator whose work builds a symbolic universe around skull iconography, drawing on psychedelic, lowbrow, and folkloric imagery. Born in Guatemala in 1981, Aguilar began developing his visual language whilst living in Chicago in 2008, amid the nation’s independent T-shirt design movement.
His artistic identity took shape while living in Seoul, South Korea, where he adopted the name Tokebi, inspired by the dokkaebi—the trickster spirits of Korean folklore. While based in Seoul, he co-founded Nothing Serious, a recurring collective exhibition and art-party series uniting Korean and international artists (2014–2015). In this phase he started creating kitsch skull illustrations, experimented with wheatpaste in the city’s streets, and designed posters for Seoul’s underground music scene. This formative period helped define his distinctive visual language: a fusion of retro psychedelia, science fiction, cyberpunk, and folklore woven into a cohesive symbolic world.
In 2018, a piece created by TOKEBI for Estéreo Etéreo (a group exhibition at Centro Cultural Camaleón in Quetzaltenango imagining impossible concerts) caught the attention of the Grammy-winning metal band Mastodon. The following year, the band selected him to create official artwork for their 2019 European tour. Since then, TOKEBI has continued developing a body of work centered on the skull as a narrative device—a modern view of the memento mori trope transformed into a persona: a traveler scavenging relics across galaxies, running away from death itself.
"The skull became mine,
a modern view of the memento mori.
a character built from everything that have shaped me."
In his most recent body of work, TOKEBI reinterprets Mesoamerican visual culture through a speculative, contemporary lens. Acrylic, acrylic marker, and technical pens are layered through a process that combines the immediacy of street-based image-making with obsessive graphic detail. Created with an almost compulsive urgency, the work moves between intuition and control, allowing speed to remain visible within its intricate surfaces. Through this tension, Aguilar constructs a visual language that reconnects his Guatemalan origins with the psychedelic, cybernetic, and mythological worlds that have defined his practice.
His practice moves fluidly between fine art, digital illustration, wearable art, and conceptual storytelling. Visually, the work evokes the collision of 1960s science fiction aesthetics with ancient myth, spiritual symbolism, and speculative futures, most fully realized in the Skulloids, a digital project in which TOKEBI fusions mythology with technology, creating ten thousand humanoid-skull characters, hand-designing fifteen core figures across a scavenger race that moves between a mirror galaxy and Earth’s own history, and using generative algorithms to mint the entire civilization.
//Enter The void
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