Bahc Yiso founded ‘Minor Injury’ in New York in 1985 and served as its director until 1989. After returning to Korea in 1995, he took up a position a professor at SADI which had recently opened. He presented his works in a number of major national and international exhibitions including Gwangju Biennale (1997) and Yokohama Triennale (2001). In 2002, he won the Hermès Korea Missulsang and was participated in the Korean Pavilion at Venice Biennale as a representative artist of Korea.
Bahc Yiso (born Park Cheol-ho). Known in
the 1990s under the pen name “Mo Bahc,” he was a key figure who systematically
introduced Anglo-American postmodern art theory to the Korean art scene, and a
marginal yet influential star whose work more recently fueled a surge of
interest in conceptual art among younger artists. His name, once prominent, has
now faded into memory. The news that he died alone of a heart attack in the
early morning of April 26 reached the art world only late last weekend—more
than a month after his passing—just as he seemed to be consolidating his
position by participating as an artist in the Korean Pavilion at last year’s
Venice Biennale.
The death of the artist at the age of 46
carries a distinctly dramatic quality. According to his family, he passed away
as if asleep, seated on a sofa beside a table holding his favorite jazz records
and a bottle of wine, in the second-floor studio of his sister’s home in
Cheongdam-dong, Seoul. Although his body was cremated, the ashes could not be
interred immediately due to the lack of a burial site; they were finally laid
to rest on June 2 in a family grave within a Christian cemetery in Paju, Gyeonggi
Province. The circumstances—his having rarely spoken to his family about the
art world, and contacts with fellow artists being discovered only belatedly
while sorting through his computer emails—cast a somber shadow over the art
community.
Upon receiving the sad news, fellow artists and curators visited his
grave on June 6 to hold a memorial service and erect a headstone. Around thirty
people attended, including artists Ahn Kyuchul and KIM Beom. Curator Lee Young
Chul remarked, “He was uncompromisingly professional when it came to his work,
and was always burdened by concerns about Korea’s fragile system for supporting
artists,” adding with regret, “In poor health, he overexerted himself preparing
for international exhibitions such as the Venice and Istanbul Biennales, which
may have hastened his death.”
After graduating from Hongik University
and majoring in painting at Pratt Institute in New York, he returned to Korea
around 1995 and became a pioneering voice introducing multiculturalism and
postmodern theory, providing intellectual impetus for debates with the socially
engaged art camp. Subsequently, through the main exhibition of the 1997 Gwangju
Biennale, his solo exhibition at Alternative Space Pool in 2001, and his Hermès
Foundation Missulsang commemorative exhibition in 2002, he helped establish a distinctive
model of cynical, distinctly Korean conceptual art. In a work notebook found in
a corner of his studio, he had written: “My interest lies in making the
impossible possible, turning west into east and up into down—dreaming of
disrupting existing value systems.” Yet the artist departed this world before
he could fully unfold those concerns.
