스킵네비게이션

Born in 1979 in Busan, South Korea

Lives in Busan

BAE Jimin works with the traditional oriental media of ink, brush, and paper. BAE lets the unique characteristic of Chinese ink record the sensibility of the city and its urban spaces. The main subjects in her large-scale SUMUK paintings are buildings, bridges, boats, lamp posts, roads, human remains, and traces in the city. BAE Jimin’s technique often results in a cinematic, noir-ish vision of the city, and the quality of the ink stick and the Korean handmade paper (hanji) represents urban space washed out by drizzling rain, dirty from dust, and bleak in its jacket of concrete greyness.

BAE’s cityscapes are poetic and visually sophisticated, but at the same time they are scary because they remind us of the loneliness and melancholy that one may feel from time to time living in a contemporary modern city. The modern city’s chaos and calmness is the subject of BAE Jimin’s 2019 series Walking ocean, in which the static meets the dynamic in shades of black and white and the occasional subtle touch of blue, or a sparkle of light yellow and red from a car’s taillight. Even though the works might be considered traditional, the emotions of solitude that the paintings evoke are universal and could be experienced in any large city or urban environment. By using an old technique to portray contemporary landscape, BAE Jimin’s style generates a new vision of traditional Korean material and painting.