Keun Young Park's Granular Collage Work

Hands #4

New Jersey-based artist Keun Young Park examines the ever-changing state of being by decomposing and then recomposing photographs into micro-collages.

Starting by taking an original photo and digitally saturating it with color using Photoshop, Park then rips the reprinted photo into miniscule pieces. From there, the artist rearranges each piece and sculpts them to mimic the original photograph. This labor-intensive process of cut and paste manifests an imperfect precision similar to Pointillism, while demonstrating a tactile version of digital pixelation.

Looking closely, each collage has a mesmerizing texture, exposing the same subtle imperfections that can be seen or felt on someone's skin. Even more, the tiny white gaps between each pasted piece form a dense pattern not often scene in traditional collage work.

As Park describes, “everything continuously changes, either being generated or destroyed.” She evokes the ambiguity of an object’s shifting presence through the visual transformation that is central to her process. From origin to destruction to regeneration, the stages of Park’s micro-collages capture, as she calls it, “the tremor of unstable presence.”

Face

Face (detail)

Dream, Birds 5

Float

Float (detail)

Blue Portrait

Absence

Absence (detail)

[via My Modern Metropolis]