Bae Ji-Min

Born in Busan 1979, Bae Ji-min graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Pusan National University in 2003. She obtained her MFA from the same institution and received a doctoral degree in Fine Arts from Hongik University in 2011. She is currently an associate professor at her alma mater.
Bae refers to her art as sumuk painting instead of ink painting, as she believes that the former term better indicates the distinct particularities of Eastern-style painting materials. Furthermore, the artist holds the opinion that the many shades of sumuk call for expression in the Korean language as they move in concert with the traditional paper medium of hanji.
The artist falls silent as soon as she encounters an unforeseen natural landscape. She comes to a standstill before torrential rain or heavy snowfall, as well as at sunrise and sunset. Just as Bae discovers a new sense of self in those moments that lend a certain unfamiliarity to the iterations of everyday life, her perspective unfolds new landscapes filled with dancing trees and cities brought back to life.
Bae’s large-scale urban sumuk paintings combine the suffusions of hanji with the diffusions of sumuk to constitute an urban civilization that has become our secondary ecosystem in place of its primal predecessor.
Nature is that which causes such urban landscapes to both emerge and recede. The confluence between the complexity of the urban scene and the serenity born out of nature mirrors the ebb and flow of tribulation and elation throughout life itself.
It is Bae’s hope that her paintings will provide her audience with a space in which to ramble about free from preconception and prejudice—that their iterations of daily life, too, will take on an unfamiliarity. She hopes that each member of her audience will thereby come to house a little ocean within them—so that they themselves will become wandering oceans as they walk among her large-scale sumuk paintings.

Submitted by KAMS - Korean Arts Management Service