See the Mona Lisa and another Renaissance-era classics come to life…in vivid 2-D! 

China seems to be producing a number of talented makeup artists in recent years. From my own Chinese students with impeccably fashionable Instagram accounts who dream of someday owning makeup companies in New York City to the internet-based makeup celebrity artist with a penchant for blurring ethnic boundaries by turning herself into Western celebrities, there’s now another artist on our radar who seemingly transcends spacial dimensions.

The 27-year-old artist in question is known as Yuya Mika online. She already had a sizable following on social media platforms such as China’s Sina Weibo, mostly due to her well-crafted celebrity impersonations. On a recent day, one such fan noticed Yuya bore a resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece the Mona Lisa (1503-06) and jokingly challenged her to transform into the painting…a request which she then followed through with all too happily. See her incredible artistic process captured in the following video.

▼ Yuya apparently began working at 10 a.m. and finished around 4 p.m. for this recreation of the Mona Lisa.

It’s almost eerie how she managed to so faithfully recreate little details in the painting, including the shadows surrounding her eyes and the small tilt of her mouth. In fact, if we didn’t know that Yuya was a living, breathing human being, we’d be completely spooked to see her eyes glance to the side as they do at the end!

Once she uploaded this video to YouTube, the rest was history. The incredibly positive global reaction prompted her to then upload a second video in which she transforms herself into another earlier da Vinci classic, Lady with an Ermine (1489-90):

We’ve got to hand it to Yuya–Mr. Sato could stand to learn a lot from her in regards to some of his own 2-D character transformations…

Sources: YouTube/YUYA MIKA, Sina Weibo/@YUYAMIKA, Weibo (Chinese)
Featured image: YouTube/YUYA MIKA
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