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My creative process begins underwater.

I photograph people beneath the surface, where light and movement constantly reshape the human form. The water, with its waves and reflections, transforms clear figures into fleeting abstractions—and back again. In that ever-changing space, I find inspiration.

The distortions created by water allow me to see beyond the surface. Faces and bodies lose their fixed form, revealing something deeper—an emotional or spiritual presence that often goes unnoticed. From these raw images, I begin a second transformation. Using digital tools, I reinterpret and reconstruct what I’ve captured. This stage is not about realism, but about expressing the unseen—creating a visual language that is uniquely my own.

Through this process, I merge photography, abstraction, and digital expression into a distinctive artistic style that reflects both the instability and depth of human identity.

IMG_5329.heic

Unique Printmaking

Giclée Prints Enhanced with Hand Painting

These pieces are a unique fusion of digital, photographic, and traditional media. The original image—born from a digital artwork based on photography—blends abstraction with realism, allowing viewers to experience both visual modes simultaneously. After the digital-to-physical transition through printmaking, hand-painted elements were added directly onto the paper. These painted gestures bring depth and tactile presence to the surface, creating a textural contrast that challenges the conventional flatness of prints. The result is a hybrid visual language that explores perception, materiality, and the dialogue between digital precision and human touch.

Special UV printing
on Renaissance board 

In this work, digital precision meets tactile depth through UV printing on a wooden board. By repeatedly printing specific sections of the image, the artist amplifies sharp lines and pixel edges, creating a surface that is both visually and physically layered. These raised textures invite the viewer to not just look, but to feel—to trace the contours of the image with their hands.

The composition itself is a meditation on dimensionality. Multiple black-and-white image layers are superimposed, forming a dense visual field that evokes an alternate spatial reality—something between memory, architecture, and imagined space. This layering suggests movement between dimensions, blurring the line between the digital and the physical, the seen and the sensed.

© 2021 by Youngkil Kang. All Rights Reserved

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