PKM Gallery presents an exhibition of Bae Young-whan from August 29th to October 7th, 2016. This is a project exhibition in which eleven new works in various media including video, sculpture and photograph are rearranged in the gallery space.

Bae Young-whan(b. 1969), one of the most prominent artists representing Korean contemporary art, has attained an international reputation with his experimental and innovative practice encompassing various media from sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, public art to film scenarios addressing important issues of the times. Connecting art and daily life through popular/subcultural keywords, pursuing the perfect balance between ideology and formal aesthetics, Bae’s work is distinguished by its creative way of subtly intertwining the sensibilities and thoughts endemic to Korean society and culture.

From his earlier series Pop Song to The Way of Man, On the Stree, The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff) and Insomnia, Bae addresses the isolation and alienation in the heart of the uniformity imposed by Korean society. In the ‘Pop Song’ series lyrics of old pop songs are written with pills, shards of broken wine bottles, or cotton balls consoling the mind of the youth agonizing in the gloomy political reality of contemporary history. Discarded wooden materials from broken furniture are reborn as guitars through ‘The Way of Man’ series – a poignant portrayal of unfulfilled romance as well as joys and sorrows of life in modern Korean history. The Insomnia series features beautiful chandeliers made of numerous shards of broken wine bottles, evoking a deep pathos for numerous sleepless souls beneath the splendor of today’s city life.

Another critical aspect of Bae’s work is his public art projects. The DMZ Project: The Temple of Light contemplates the meaning of peace, coexistence and harmony through a space surrounded by disappearing letters. The portable container library project Tomorrow creates cultural spaces for children and the elderly in culturally marginalized areas. The Pocketbook for the Homeless – On the Street was a project that produced pocketbooks containing a map of free food stations and distributed them to the homeless. The Most Beautiful Language in the World is a large scale mural created in collaboration with a group of hearing-impaired students. Bae’s public art projects have shown a hopeful direction and method for the socially conscious artistic practice.

The Autonumina series suggested a new aesthetic direction for the exploration of the human consciousness and mind. The ‘Abstract Verb’ series offers “abstract verbs” that reveal themselves through will and action in order to break through the petrified concept of “abstract nouns,” raising a fundamental question about the essence of existence. The most recent body of work 《Pagus Avium》, first presented as the inaugural exhibition of Platform-L Contemporary Art Center in 2016, draws a grand sketch of aesthetic consilience by reinterpreting the original thoughts and primordial aesthetic consciousness inherent in Asian civilizations in the contemporary visual language, through the symbolic identity, ‘bird’ that embraces both reality and the ideal.

References

• 《Project Exhibition: Bae Young-whan》