Tracing Dain Yoon's Illusions

Written by Kyle Fitzpatrick
Published on June 08, 2018

Dain Yoon is constantly remaking herself. She—like much of the human population—has all ten fingers and ten toes, two eyes and one nose. But she can fool the masses into believing otherwise.

Yoon isn’t a magician or superhuman. She is an artist who is best known known for her illusions and her body—as well as her audience’s perception of the human body—is her canvas. The South Korean creator utilizes paint to recreate herself, to multiply it, to copy and recopy her features until you are staring at a living, human abstraction.

Instead of being an artist working in the surrealist style—like what Salvador Dali did with clocks or Max Ernst did with pastoral landscapes—Yoon becomes surrealism every time she puts brush to skin. She is a step deeper into the postmodern wormhole of creating the otherworldly and the internet age is walking with her. Over 400,000 art lovers follow her on Instagram alone. “Painting is my way of language,” Yoon says in response to her accrued fans.

The daughter of an architect and an artist, Seoul-born Yoon has been painting since age 10, likening her craft to a musician; like the plucking of strings allows a guitarist to express himself, the stroke of her materials lets her emote what her words can’t quite describe. But a guitarist goes to school to learn how to play guitar, and a conventional painter learns to blend colors on more standard canvases, but probably not the human body. So how did Yoon develop her very specific practice? After years of exercising her creativity at a number prestigious art-focused grade schools, Yoon later went to South Korea’s National University of the Arts to major in scenography, defined as theatrical set design. It’s this very specific study that allows her to turn her body into her stage, so many times and so expertly that she has already put on two solo shows in her native city at age 25.

Illusions, in particular, are a means for Yoon to turn herself inside out, to take her mood on that given day and, quite literally, wear it for all to see. “I am a very sensitive person and my emotion has always been the source of my inspiration,” she explains. “When I drew the blurring artwork, I felt emotionally very vague and was lost. When I painted myself collapsing as cubes, I felt myself fall apart and was broken.”

What she draws, however, often goes beyond the personal. Yoon also has a tendency to grab at almost literary references for new sources. To her, she sees her creations as a sort of fantasy, for the dream to become the dreamer. While many other artists also explore surrealism with new technology and Photoshop, Yoon opts to keep her process traditional. Of course, it would be easier to use our modern world’s resources, since she spends hours in the mirror on one work. But Yoon sticks to hands and paints to devise because she worries about losing the intimacy she feels. “Use of technical devices or software don’t have or convey the human soul,” she says. Yoon hypothesizes that this might be part of her appeal, particularly when she places her work out on the street.

“Some people are stunned—few do not enjoy it,” she explains. “I believe people live in illusions. Many people could think my artwork is circumscribed within Instagram; however, real life is also important because we still live in the real world.” Her contemplation of this concept is what has motivated her to expand, to straddle the relationship between the real and the digital by connecting with them in real life on a worldwide scale. So far, Yoon has taken her version of self portraiture to the streets of New York, Seoul and Kiev—because as shocking as it is to see her uploaded photos, one can imagine the response she gets when people see her galavanting on the street, with multiple eyes and lips or the like, as briskly as any other passerby.

And that element of performance art goes even further when she brings others into her world—such as when she yielded a new, more abstract iteration of the flashmob. “There is always something unexpected that happens no matter how I plan,” Yoon says of her performances. “The appeal of expanding my painting to others is scale. As gigantic sculpture has a power of overwhelming audiences with impressive size, the power of many people painted makes a huge difference in terms of scale, making it more dramatic.”

And drama is key. To Yoon, regardless of the style or substance of her work, she’s seeking to wow people, to see the illusion within themselves. “I made my own painting style,” Yoon says. “I strive for that new idea...I do not know what will be next yet—and I am curious about it.”