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.

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 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.