Im Sunny earned a bachelor’s (1999) in Western painting, a master’s degree (2002) in Western painting and printmaking at Ewha Woman University and a doctor’s degree (2014) in Western painting at the same university. She currently lives and works in Seoul.
Im
Sunny has developed a practice of creating self-replicating self-portraits by
projecting her own image onto scenes from popular media such as films, news
broadcasts, and television dramas. In this exhibition, the artist presents
works in which she composites herself into scenes from various dramas she
frequently watched.
These works consist of videos that reconstruct entirely
new, personal narratives—distinct from the original storyline and flow of the
dramas—as well as paintings that translate these images onto canvas. Through
this process, the artist becomes the protagonist within these scenarios,
engaging in an active exploration of the self by discovering her presence
within a range of situations.
Television
scenes create spaces with a powerful sense of plausibility that often surpasses
reality, by enabling the realization of experiences that cannot be encountered
in everyday life. For this reason, television dramas function as a generative
force within contemporary culture and as a source that produces everyday
narratives.
Within her work, the artist constructs theatrical spaces in which
fiction and truth, the public and the private, and the virtual and the real are
intertwined, traversing between reality and imagination. By combining the
private act of watching television with the public nature of mass media, she
reconstructs widely recognizable settings from television dramas into spaces
imbued with her own personal narratives.
By identifying points of connection
between herself and the lives of the characters, she generalizes these
experiences, ultimately revealing the concealed aspects of contemporary
individuals and reading the narratives embedded within contemporary culture.
