Sangho Bang

Korean artist Sangho Bang makes pictures where a hole is a way through, not a wall. “Space-acid” colour, microscopic detail, and what he calls a “cosmic primordial soup.” Come closer. Scale will change its mind.

Trained as a freelance illustrator, Bang’s surreal vision has propelled collaborations with global brands, from animating vast digital installations for Hong Kong’s Sogo department store to designing psychedelic loop pedals for Fender. Yet his breakthrough arrived at San Diego Comic Con 2022, where he merged his hallucinatory planets with Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty for a carnival-themed series. The synergy was uncanny. “I’d never seen the show before,” Bang admits. “But our worlds shared a DNA—absurdity, multiplicity, existential chaos.” His response? A visual symbiosis where his art met the show’s universe, or vice versa.

Central to Bang’s ethos are holes—celestial gateways bridging the colossal and the cellular. A planet might double as a sweater’s thread under magnification; a crater could lead to a subatomic room. “Every object has its own holes,” he explains. “They’re passages to worlds too vast or minuscule to comprehend.” This philosophy pulses through projects like Pink Pupil, an ongoing book and film starring a female proxy of the artist himself who escapes societal constraints via a planet-shaped lens, becoming “addicted” to Bang’s own botanical dimensions. “Drawing is my escape,” he reflects. “She embodies that flight.”

Color runs Bang’s pictures. Rejecting minimalism, he layers hues until they vibrate in discordant harmony. “I let them clash, then coalesce,” he says. This chromatic habit translates to animation, apparel, and murals, each piece an invitation to wander.

In Bang’s pictures, beauty is a slippery, shapeshifting force—a cell’s structure mirrors a galaxy; a pupil opens onto another room. His work asks us to look in, with the thrill of what you might find.