Keun Young Park Tears Up Photos into Fantastic Paper Collages

Korean artist Keun Young Park’s torn-paper portraits of floating figures, faces, arms and hands appear to be disintegrating into space. Some pieces are rather explosive, like in her “Dream” series, featuring figures that transform into trees and erupt into clouds of birds. Each image begins as a photograph taken by Park, which she manipulates digitally in Photoshop, then shreds into thousands of tiny pieces only to paste them back together again. Park’s approach is not unlike that of Pointillism, the application of small, distinct dots of color into pattern to form an image, first used by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in 1886. They are almost somewhat Divisionist, as in her separation of colors into individual dots or patches. Park explains her reason for working this way is to study the figure and facial expressions, with a focus on the process of deconstructing and reconstructing the human image. “I intend to reflect upon the a-static character of existence in the flow of time… I attempt to capture the tremor of unstable presence,” she says. It’s a process that sometimes takes her up to several months to complete. The result is an surrealistic collage that has a heightened sense of texture and depth than the original photograph.