Korean painter Young-sung Kim has been very interested in drawing animals since he was a kid. When he was 9 years old, he was drawing a cicada and realized this was going to be his life. He felt very disappointed that the cicada he was drawing did not look like a real one, and that made him decide to become an artist.
Now an internationally renowned hyperrealist artist, with paintings in places like the Waterfall Mansion, NYC & Plus One Gallery in London, he still follows the same creative process as when he started out: he walks and collects small animals, takes photos, prepares his canvas, and then makes a sketch before setting up to work with tiny brushes and oils to achieve his incredibly realistic paintings.
His amazing paintings take between three and ten months to complete, and when he is working on a new piece, he works every day between 10 and 12 hours.
His favorite piece until now is Bumblebee, which took him over a year to complete. He says looking at this reminds him of his childhood, when he would look through the lens of a microscope at the animals he collected, and how mesmerized he felt by the details he saw.
About the subjects of his paintings -animals-, he says, “I have chosen my genre as hyperrealism because of the people in our society who think of animals and nature as things for ornament, experiment, and eating; and people abuse animals regularly because of these reasons, and it’s considered valid. By drawing and creating these hyperrealist paintings, more than with a photo, more than with an image in a TV or a screen, I want to shock people and make them think differently about these creatures. I want to make people think twice before abusing, intentionally or not, animals and nature. Let’s take care of small animals. If they can not live in this world, humans cannot live either.”
What he is trying to achieve is to make paintings that are more real than reality itself, something that looks and feels more real than photos or videos, no matter how much resolution the monitors and screens get.
Enjoy these ten paintings and see if you could tell them apart from a photograph!
All photos Young-sung Kim
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