Artist Transforms Herself Into Mind-Bending Optical Illusions Without Any Photoshop

By Sara Barnes on February 11, 2021

“The Inferno of Earthly Delights”

Like many artists, Dain Yoon enjoys working with paint. But it’s not a canvas that she puts pigment to—it's her own body. Using an extensive palette of paints and brushes, she applies the pigment to her skin and transforms herself into amazing optical illusions. Her creations go beyond fooling the eye, and they're convincing enough to make you believe that she is now what she has painted. And most impressively of all, she does this all without the use of Photoshop or other photo manipulation programs.

Much of Yoon's early work focused just on her face, but she has grown her portfolio to include complex illusions that incorporate her entire body. In one creation, she turned herself into her laptop; Yoon painted part of her face to look like the keyboard and even colored her hair to match up with the real screen. But not to be tied to one type of image, one of Yoon's latest body paintings was inspired by a trip to The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. There, she saw the work of Hieronymus Bosch and decided to create a painting in his style on her skin.

Yoon calls her Bosch-inpsired work The Inferno of Earthly Delights. The body art features an idyllic scene that covers most of her face but reaches a fiery pit at her chin and onto her chest. Ultimately, the meaning behind the piece seems open to interpretation. “A lot of times, I feel it’s more difficult to express myself in words,” Yoon tells My Modern Met, “than it is through painting…”