Welcome to artist Yunbomu’s sticker-bombed dream worlds, complete with strange symbols and eye floaters

Ever wondered what it would be like if you could put stickers all over your eyes? Of course you haven’t, but Tokyo-based artist Yunbomu has gone ahead and shown you what that looks like anyways. In these unique works, Cmd+C and Cmd+V are Yunbomu’s greatest tools. Created within the digital environment of Photoshop and Illustrator, Yunbomu is captivated by the expressive freedom that these applications’ tools can offer, with the flexibility to immediately undo actions or multiply them. Employing a layering technique, playing with the “smooth, inorganic textures of digital art”, Yunbomu experiments with how this aesthetic can coexist with the organic, raw textures found in photography – and in the process, recreates life swarmed by colourful eye floaters.

The results are strange daydreams, with mesmerising shapes and glyphs cluttering every image – some artworks look like a certain asset has been spammed across photographic canvases, whereas others incorporate careful placements of playful characters drawn in digital paint. “My primary theme is the ‘suggestive dreams’ I experience daily – those vivid dreams where the line between good and bad is blurred,” says Yunbomu. “In Korea, there is a superstition that ‘selling’ (sharing) a bad dream to others makes it lose its power; I find a similar healing through my art by sublimating my dreams into my work.” Interestingly, Yunbomu’s wingding-opuses feel like the visual representation of Kieran Hebden’s (also known as Four Tet) intriguing electronic project ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ.

To ground the emotional turbulence caused by her dreams, Yunbomu photographs nature and landscapes, driven by the “uncanny subconscious” and nameless beauty hidden within the mundane. “I create to clear my own mind and seek salvation through a pure dialogue with visual language,” says Yunbomu. Inspired by Hilma af Klint and Kazimir Malevich for their unwavering commitments to abstract expression, as well as Atsuki Kikuchi for his “stimulation in structural forms”, Yunbomu has created something authentically weirdcore, as well as an original take on dream analysis and aesthetics that doesn’t feel overly kooky. It’s an ocular patchwork of symbols bursting through the seams of reality.