Sangbin IM

the long version

"Best known for his composite photographs--vibrant works composed of hundreds of images taken over a series of days and embedded over painted surfaces--IM's works seamlessly blend painting and photography, integrating the two mediums to create a hyperrealist vision. Exploring the relationship between fantasy and reality, IM begins with the subject of the urban environment, and then manipulates and idealizes it, creating a utopian vision of a place. Altering scale, exaggerating color saturation, and combining digital images with a painterly surface, IM creates works that challenge viewers' perception and conflate illusion and reality. Sangbin IM: Spectacle will feature works from the artist's People series, a collection of constructed photographs created during the last two years, which portray crowds of people at notable cultural destinations and tourist hubs around the world. To create each work, IM photographed a single location over a series of days and then combined cropped digital images with painted textures to create a unified study of a single location."--Ryan Lee Gallery website.