Bahc Yiso, Don’t Look Back, 1994/Reproduced 2006 © Rodin Gallery - Samsung Museum of Art

Bahc Yiso passed away in April 2004 at the age of 47 from a heart attack in his studio. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University, he moved to New York in 1982 and studied at Pratt Institute. Following the completion of his graduate studies, he founded and operated a non-profit alternative space titled ‘Minor Injury’ in the Greenpoint area of North Brooklyn beginning in 1985. As a Korean artist studying abroad, Bahc Yiso ran a progressive exhibition space within the New York art scene, introducing the work of artists from the Third World and other marginalized communities in the United States, while also engaging in substantial activities such as publishing informational bulletins and organizing performances and seminars.

Notably, he actively incorporated local community events into the space, creating a vibrant forum for exchange and dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood. These activities drew the attention of American media, particularly because they took place in a culturally marginalized area of Brooklyn during the mid-1980s, when multiculturalism was reaching its height. Bahc Yiso was active in multiple roles: as a director of an alternative space offering critical perspectives on the art institution, as a freelance writer suggesting new paths for contemporary art, and as a translator who introduced new theoretical texts useful for artistic practice to Korea.

As an artist, his talent was also recognized through awards in painting from both the New York State government and the U.S. federal government. As an artist living as an outsider, he confronted the cultural boundary between Korea and the United States in which he was situated, demonstrating a remarkable ability to infuse his work with human warmth and humor. For him, issues of cultural identity were not generalized opinions about the world but processes of inner reflection, inseparable from his persistent artistic questioning of honesty.

After returning to Korea in 1995, Bahc Yiso participated in numerous curated exhibitions, international biennales, and artist residency programs both in Korea and abroad, gaining international recognition as a significant figure in Korean contemporary art of the 1990s. As a professor at SADI, he devoted himself fully to education, realizing a vision for new art education through exceptional critical insight and rigorous pedagogy.

Following his return, his work gradually expanded beyond identity-based concerns rooted in his experience as a minority in the United States, turning instead toward themes such as human powerlessness, unpredictability, disappearance, and the absence of purpose. His practice increasingly centered on what might be called the “uselessness” of art itself. In the years leading up to his death, he produced several project-based works that demonstrated deep insight into the finite and ephemeral nature of human life.

The exhibition is curated by guest curator Professor Lee Young-chul (Kaywon University of Art & Design), a close friend and colleague of the artist during his lifetime, who finds the conceptual framework of the exhibition in Dante’s Divine Comedy, a foundational work of narrative drama. The exhibition seeks a spiritual encounter between Dante’s “pilgrimage” of body and soul and Bahc Yiso’s artistic trajectory. Bahc Yiso’s twenty years of artistic practice possessed a strong pilgrim-like character, pursuing both immanence and transcendence without succumbing to the relative values of the world.

The exhibition concept, ‘Comedy of Detachment,’ is conceived as a vessel well-suited to the artist’s expansive imagination, playful sensibility, and distinctive style, all of which consistently engaged with the duality of life. The figure of the ‘thinking person,’ maintaining a silent and unwavering posture amid the dynamism of the world—its absurdities, tragedies, unknowability, contingency, and loneliness—has stood as a representative image of intellectuals and artists since modernity.

This thinking figure is also the subject who practices “live in your head,” the subtitle of the exhibition 《When Attitudes Become Form》 (1969), which connected the conceptual practices of contemporary artists with fundamental questions about life. Ultimately, the most profound question posed to us by Bahc Yiso’s diverse body of work over two decades is an inquiry into the authenticity of ‘attitude’ as a thinking being.

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