PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault are pleased to present “Autonumina,” an exhibition of new work by Bae Young-whan, from August 26 to October 1, 2010. In his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Bae will show interrelated groups of sculptures, along with works on paper and canvas, that draw upon the conceptual tenets of his formal training in Oriental painting to engage with questions revolving around “landscape” as a fluid category that traverses aesthetic and ontological boundaries.
Bae casts his intellectual net far and wide, seeking out correspondences among such seemingly disparate points of reference as EEG graphs of his own brain waves; the patterns of peaks and valleys that are a salient motif in the genre of ideal landscape in traditional Korean painting; the surrealist belief in automatism as a manifestation of the subconscious; and the mystical concepts of the spiritual and the sacred expounded by such thinkers as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade. The title of the exhibition, “Autonumina,” extends and inverts Otto’s idea of “the numinous” so that the sense of mysticism and transcendence central to this concept becomes a self-generated experience.
In the works that make up the centerpiece of the exhibition, Bae puts a sculptural twist on the Oriental painting’s ideal of the calligraphic stroke that encapsulates all. Through quick, reflexive kneading motion of his bare hands, he has produced numerous ceramic objects whose spontaneous forms are correlatives of the brain waves in his EEG graphs. Arranged row upon row, they constitute landscapes that are at once material and metaphorical, and like the scholar’s rocks of old, a model of a world more compliant with the human impulse toward order and significance. Other notable works include wooden tables whose carved surfaces morph into undulating mountain ranges, and an oversized silk panel stenciled with the artist’s EEG readings—the elusive, immaterial conditions of sentience rendered visible, in a dense pattern of stylized waves that become abstractions of mountains and seas.
Recognized for an artistic practice that melds a sense of vernacular beauty with neo-conceptual strategies and a social consciousness informed by the legacy of Minjoong Misool (a politically charged genre that emerged in Korea amid the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s), Bae Young-whan is attuned to both the ephemeral surfaces as well as the deeper structures of feeling and thought that underlie certain aspects of Korean culture and society. “Autonumina,” marks the first time that Bae has turned explicitly to the intellectual basis of his training in Oriental painting to undertake a contemporary exploration of conceptions of nature, particularly the archetypal landscapes of mountains and seas, in the Korean consciousness, imagination, and spiritual makeup.
Born in 1969, Bae Young-whan graduated with a BFA in Oriental painting from Hongik University, Seoul. Selected exhibitions include Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2009); Activating Korea: Tides of Collective Action, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2007); Symptoms of Adolescence, Rodin Gallery, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2006); Korean Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale (2005); Battle of Visions, Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2005); Facing Korea: Demirrorized Zone, De Appel, Amsterdam (2003); 2nd Busan Biennale (2002); 3rd, 4th, and 5th Gwangju Biennales (2000, 2002, 2004). In 2006, he was chosen as a finalist for the Hermès Korea Art Prize. In 2009, the Artsonje Center, Seoul, presented The Library Project 來日(Tomorrow), a solo exhibition in the form of a proposal, including models and prototypes, for an ambitious public project to build modular, prefab libraries for children and senior citizens in rural and economically depressed communities. This project is slated to be featured as part of Prospect.2, the international biennial in New Orleans organized by Dan Cameron, in the fall of 2011.
