[INTERVIEW] Artist pioneers illusionary makeup

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Entertainment & Arts

Sun, October 1, 2023 | 22:02

INTERVIEWArtist pioneers illusionary makeup

Posted : 2018-01-03 15:46

Updated : 2018-01-04 10:14

I felt like I became a Russian doll / Courtesy of Yoon Dain

By Choi Ha-young

Yoon Dain, a 24-year-old visual illusion artist, uses her body as a canvas to express her inspirations.

"Giving shape to an ambiguous image is what I try to do. To make one art piece, I think over and over on embodying something familiar in an unfamiliar form," Yoon said in an interview with The Korea Times.

Her art piece entitled "I felt like I became a Russian doll" is motivated by Matryoshka dolls. There, Yoon has 10 eyes with multilayered lips. It's tricky to figure how whether she is happy or sad. Multiple identities and sentiments coexisting in one person is what she aims to illustrate.

"Like the idiom ‘don't judge a book by its cover,' everybody has a perception about others. For example, some people assume that I would be a cool-headed person based on impressions, but actually I think I'm not," Yoon said. "I wanted to show my various appearances through this makeup."

Her paintings have gone viral since 2016 through social media and she was featured on The Ellen Show in October. After that, many foreign media outlets have covered her work.

Each makeup look takes about three hours just for the painting. Bigger projects take over two months of preparations. In May, Yoon led a performance with dancers and a composer at an art gallery in Seoul. "Wearing pink body paint, I walked toward the gallery along with 12 performers. I wanted to make the familiar streets look unfamiliar to the audience."

The House of Manhae Han Yong-un / Courtesy of Yoon Dain

Another of her works, "The House of Manhae Han Yong-un" also adopted the so-called "defamiliarization" strategy. Standing against the backdrop of a Hanok, a traditional Korean house, her face looks like a transparent screen.

Entertainment is one of the factors that Yoon keeps in mind with her paintings. "I pursue arts that many people can enjoy, not only myself," she said. "People are intrigued by funny things. Too serious, not that fun. This is what my mother, who is an artist too, has told me since when I was very young."

"Is it my face or my fingers? Believe it or not! Isn't it fun to dismantle the boundary between what is real and what is fake?" To see more paintings, visit her Instagram page: www.instagram.com/designdain/

hayoung.choi@ktimes.com