Meet the South Korean artist using her own body as a canvas

When Dain Yoon started painting on her own skin to create surreal self-portraits, people in South Korea looked at her like a “dokkaebi,” a kind of Korean goblin, she said. A viral photograph which featured her face in miniature painted onto fingernails and adorned with her own flowing black hair, was meanwhile described by people on the internet as a “hairy manicure.”

“I thought ‘this is cute’ when I made it,” she said of the photograph, speaking to CNN on a video call from the US, where she now lives. “But I guess many people thought it was scary.”

With bright pink hair and a shirt patterned with a surreal print of disembodied body parts, Yoon might have turned heads in her native Seoul, but in New York, no one bats an eyelid — and she loves it.

In one of Yoon's self-portraits, she transforms herself into a mesmerising geometric 3D creation by painted triangular shapes in light and dark.

The 30-year-old said her images have resonated the most in Europe and the US. It wasn’t until she was noticed overseas, after her work went viral in 2016, that people started paying attention back home, she added. “What they appreciate was I got attention from American press,” said Yoon. “Not only me, but a lot of Korean artists or singers. If they get attention from abroad, then Koreans appreciate it.”

Yoon’s photorealistic, mind-bending optical illusions brought her into the orbit of musicians like Halsey and James Blake, both of whom she has collaborated with, and even earned her an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” Since then, she has worked on commercials for the likes of Estée Lauder, BMW, Apple and Adidas, and graced the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar with a style of body painting that leaves people wondering where she ends, and the background begins — and whether there was any Photoshop involved.

Yoon says she never manipulates her images in post-production. It’s just her, a mirror, a camera and body paint, for between three and 12 hours per shoot. This lengthy process is one reason why she ceased using models for her work — she didn’t want to take up so much of another person’s time.

In "View from my studio" (2021), the artist painted herself blending into the scene visible from her window in New York. Scroll through the gallery to see more of Dain Yoon's work.

While images like "Miss Universe 2022" may be unsettling to some, Yoon said she wants her work to be playful and expressive.

It's hard to see what's paint and what's the artist in "Drawer" (2018)

Rather than concealing her identity, the emojis used in 2002's "What I'm made of" express how Yoon was feeling — and communicating — at the time.

In "Portrait 2019," the artist expressed the feeling she was made up of pieces woven together.

"Hair nails" (2017) was one of the pieces that brought Yoon viral fame.

For her 2023 piece "Sleepless Night," Yoon lit a candle in a waxwork based on her own image to mark her 30th birthday.

Feeling sharp and sensitive at the time, Yoon painted this self-portrait earlier this year to capture the moment.

The artist painted an earlier piece "Hallucinogenic Dain" at her family home in South Korea in 2017.

"Falling Angels" (2019) is Yoon's twist on classical paintings of cherubs.

Surreal selfies: This artist uses her own body as a canvas

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Captivating distortions

Yoon has been told her works are dizzying and at times unsettling — think facial features distorted and realigned like a Mr. Potato Head, a semi-molten candle carved in her likeness covered with unblinking eyes or a face that looks like it’s woven together and peeling off in rivulets like a disassembled handbag. Unnerving viewers was never her goal (the artist said she doesn’t even really like dark work, preferring to inject humor) but with her face often the canvas for her art, people sometimes prescribe more meaning to it than she intends, she added.

Most of the time Yoon looks to be playful and express her inner world. She’s taken to painting self-portraits as emotional snapshots of how she was feeling. Earlier this year, she felt very sharp and sensitive, which is reflected in a cubist-style piece that sees her face distorted by a prism of triangles through which one eye gives a clear, piercing look. In another piece, “Let it flow,” the ripples and eddies of brush strokes hug the curves of Yoon’s face and neck, while in “Miss Universe,” her visage — other than her bright red lips and pink hair — is completely obscured by grasping fingers.

“It’s kind of contradictory, sarcastic,” she said, reflecting on the latter piece. “Because for me, this is beautiful.”

The artist painted an earlier piece “Hallucinogenic Dain” at her family home in South Korea in 2017.

In her piece “What I’m made of,” Yoon’s face is entirely painted over by emojis, a tapestry of smiley faces, lightbulbs, hearts and other expressions of her identity. They’ve blurred her features to leave her only vaguely recognizable, but rather than concealing who she is, Yoon said the emojis capture how she was feeling and communicating the year she moved to the US.

“I realized that, since I moved to America, I’m using so many emojis because it’s just easier for me than speaking in English. It’s like ha-ha emoji, emoji, emoji,” she said miming texting. “In the past I tried to explain in words and sentences, but now just one tiny emoji shows everything.”

For her 2023 piece "Sleepless Night," Yoon lit a candle in a waxwork based on her own image to mark her 30th birthday.

This exploration of being a stranger in a strange new world is part of a new creative direction that is moving her away from processing the difficult feelings she had as a young woman in South Korea. “I’ve become a more stable, stronger person,” Yoon said of her move to New York.

“There is like one secret diary that I always write in whenever I feel very sad or unwell,” said Yoon. “I used to write once a week, and now the last time I was writing was two months (ago).”