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Lately, we've seen a host of makeup artists and YouTube vloggers getting insanely creative with beauty. But the trippy, image-within-an-image creations of 22-year-old South Korean Dain Yoon might just have them all beat. The artist, who is a senior at Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, paints mind-bending, reality-defying scenes that evoke the works of surrealist painters — on herself.
Yoon identifies as an illusion artist. For as long as she can remember, she says she's enjoyed drawing, painting, and people. To combine her trio of interests, she started using her own face and body as the canvas. "I have discovered that different people resonate different first impressions, and those change as I study them," she tells us. "In the same way that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I realized that what I see on the surface doesn't cover every perspective."
This realization spurred her desire to express the "multi-dimensioned perspectives that humans possess," and led her to create her signature overlapping works of art. Her pieces force a double take when you realize there's more to them than what first meets the eye. "The beauty of my art is for the audiences to discover new perspectives as they adopt closer looks," Yoon says. To come up with her illusions, she pulls inspiration from both films and her daily life.
Her ultimate goal is that of the cinema, too: to give people a break. "I hope that the audiences enjoy my work and maybe forget their worries for a couple of seconds." Click through to check out some of the artist's mind-boggling work — the last slide is INSANE — and then head over to her Instagram to see some in-action videos of her process.
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