Bae Yoon Hwan Korea, b. 1983

Bae Yoon Hwan has explored consistently on the movements and unique aspects of Korean figurative art since the millennium, encompasses painting, video art, installation and graffiti. Influenced by the Internet Era, he has collected rich references from the internet to build his own style. Rather than simply arranging images, Bae’s developed the narrative within a canvas by giving the role of individual images within a structure that has sprouted and multiplied infinitely from his imagination.

In his early works, Bae infused his thoughts and imaginations influenced by repeated exposure in information overload through a dynamic brushstrokes. His works consists of abrupt utterances of fragmental and anecdotal stories instead of following a coherent storyline in a large-scale canvas; it is a manifestation of his original figurative ‘Automatism.’ He then expands his artistic practice to sculptures and videos, conceiving a multi-layered in a feature-length story, and organizing a way of visualizing it in series. In Road to Studio B (2018, single channel video, 11min 40sec), he combined drawings, installations, and clay art that are produced by steps in stop motion animation techniques to figure Bae’s desire for the aesthetic pursuit and his dedication. Bae’s latest painting reflects the current social incidents of global phenomena. Scenes featuring personified animals and depicting them humorously are designed to lower the seriousness of veiled references in the painting could give, or to keep universal pictorial purity against them.

Bae Yoon Hwan lives and works in Jeju. He has held solo exhibitions at Doosan Gallery New York (2018), Space Mom (2014), Insa Art Space (2014). Bae has also included in group exhibitions at SeMA (2022, 2018), Geumcheon Foundation for Arts and Culture (2021), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2019), Jeju Museum of Art (2019). He was selected as a resident artist of National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Doosan Gallery New York, SeMA Nanji residency. His works are in the collections of MMCA, SeMA, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Cheongju Museum of Art in Korea.