Bae Young-whan

Bae Young-whan’s artistic practice encompasses sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography, as well as public projects that effect mediations in the society at large. Born in 1969 and sometimes identified with a generation of Korean artists grappling with the legacies of Minjung art—a politically charged genre that emerged amid the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s—he is more interested in devising a poetics of lived experience than in a program of politics. 

Bae’s work combines a keen awareness of vernacular beauty with neo-conceptual strategies. Often making use of humble, mundane elements—discarded wood from construction sites, broken bottles, sentimental song lyrics—his art is attuned to the ephemeral surfaces as well as the deeper structures of feeling that underlie Korean society. Academically trained in traditional Asian painting (BFA, Hongik University, Seoul), he also draws upon the conceptual tenets of that discipline to undertake a distinctly contemporary engagement with timeless questions surrounding the individual’s relationship to nature, culture, and society in the collective Korean consciousness.