Sleepers

Kim Dong Yoo is possessed by a fastidious artistic interest in the image within image, evidenced in the painstaking process of hand-painting the miniature grid portraits making up the whole image. His paintings defy the urge to visually apprehend everything at once. Instead, each composition is composed of elemental pixelated grid images, each of which is a microcosm existing in its own right yet interacting with the overall impression conjured up by the organic conglomeration of each unit. As a result, these stunning canvases offer the illusion of wholeness from afar, and only fracture into a sea of minute faces when viewed up close. Beyond the aesthetic interest of these photo-realist mosaic paintings, Kim Dong Yoo's strategic choices of subject result in compelling and provocative pairings as a parody of the mystification of and speculation on celebrity figures by media. In Marilyn Monroe vs. John F. Kennedy (Lot 512), Monroe is fabricated with pressured grid of Kennedy. Kim recognized John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe as ideal examples of iconic reminders of capitalism and knowingly consumed their most famous headshot as the subject motif to devise playful riddles on their relation to mass culture and personal interactions between the mini unit of portraitures and the overall image. The same practice is utilized in his Jackson Pollack (Lot 595), in which a monumental face shot of Jackson Pollack is illusionistically depicted by the tightly formulated grid portraits of other celebrity figures who were allegedly entangled with this cultural icon according to the fabricated mythical tales by the media. Referencing the mass-production and propagation of images pioneered by Pop Art notables like Andy Warhol, Kim Dong Yoo's works, however, turn in new direction; by hand-painting every tiny portrait without the aid of stencils, stamps or computers, and repeating such laborious process on end for months, Kim Dong Yoo subverts and challenges the idea of the reproducibility of the "icon" by appropriating the image for intricate, one-of-a-kind compositions, a revolutionary novelty that has garnered him a great deal of reputation.