Royyal Dog — Street Regal
If global beauty, harmony, and unity has a look, then one artist has set out to capture it. Royyal Dog, also known as Chris Chanyang Shim, is the dedicated alchemist of a multicultural image of beauty, through the lens of a Korean street artist. His best known pieces depict women of diverse ethnic backgrounds wearing Hanbok, a garment which translates literally to Korean Clothing, and which is used in Korean culture to signify social status and rank.
Shim primarily depicts radiant, glowing children, men and women of color, confronting a cultural standard of white skin reflecting desirability in Korean society (which is not outwardly attributed to racism, but which inflicts an unrelenting colorism and racial prejudice in Korean culture regardless).
His style is photorealistic and created with spray paint, which he applies entirely free-hand. The pieces are mostly large-scale outdoor murals in profoundly urban areas. Given the enormous scale of most of these works, their gracefulness and balance are masterful to say the least. When you encounter the works they resonate as nothing less than reflections of the divine at a scale as large as life itself.
The images are compassionately gorgeous, genuinely loving, and a glowing tribute to the divinity of the individual, in all its forms. There is an implicit statement in each work — an assertion of a fact. “Is this not beautiful?” each piece asks the viewer, and without waiting for an answer the work speaks, “Yes, this is what beauty looks like.”
The artist resides in Los Angeles, a fitting home for an artist who sees his city, and his world, bursting with the beauty of angels.
Royyal Dogg (Chris Chanyang Shim) seated in from of a mural of his in Sioux City, Iowa.
