BAE YOUNG-WHAN

Bae Young-whan’s artistic practice encompasses sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and public projects that affect mediation in society. 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.

Bae Young-whan has held solo institutional exhibitions at Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul (2016); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2012); and Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2009), among others. His work has been included in group shows at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2013); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2012); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2010); and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2009). He has participated in various international biennials, including SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul (2014); Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); 3rd Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2011); Korean Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale (2005); and Gwangju Biennale (2000, 2002, 2004).

In 2013, he was recognized by the Korean Ministry of Culture with a Grand Prize, Korean Public Design Award, for a project which set up modular, prefab libraries for children and senior citizens in rural and economically depressed communities—a project which grew out of models and prototypes shown in a 2009 solo exhibition at Art Sonje Center, Seoul.

Bae’s work is in a number of prominent public collections, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Courtesy BB&M