So Yoon Lym’s Paintings of Hair and Braid Patterns

So Yoon Lym is a Korean New Jersey-based artist who has spent parts of her life also in Kenya, Uganda and France and who works in different mediums. In this post, we want to introduce her ongoing series of realistic acrylic on paper paintings of hair and braid patterns, titled “The Dreamtime“.

She started the series in the summer of 2008 and the paintings are based on photos she has taken of students and strangers she came across in Paterson, New Jersey where she has been working for the past 9 years.

I the description on her website, she explains: “I have a strong interest in hair as a transformative vehicle of physicality.  I am also interested in the associations of hair and hairstyles as indicators of social, cultural, ethnic and gender affiliations.(…) These hair and braid pattern designs are for the most part viewed from an aerial perspective.  In most cultures around the world, perspective in art is aerial. It is not the egocentric perspective of European Renaissance art.  The aerial perspective that the aborigines used in their art was a way of showing that nature, the land, life, the earth, all living things, and all creative forces are greater than us, but we are tied to and interconnected to all things around us as spirits floating in a time continuum.”

via my love for you