Bae Yoon Hwan: Lobster Quadrille
Chapter II Yard is pleased to announce Lobster Quadrille, a solo exhibition by Bae Yoon Hwan, from 15th October to 28th November in Seongsu-dong, Seoul.
Bae Yoon Hwan’s pictorial storytelling stems from political incidents, stories, fables and his personal experiences. By selectively employing images from a constant outpouring of media imageries or some art-historical pictures considered as classics, Bae juxtaposes and contrasts abundant tales contained in them in order to transform them into ceaseless narratives visualized in a variety of scales of forms. Thus, his practice consists of abrupt utterances of fragmental and anecdotal stories instead of following a coherent storyline; it is a manifestation of his original figurative ‘Automatism’.
The title of the exhibition, Lobster Quadrille, is borrowed from one of the chapters of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Since he happened to read a newsletter from Greenpeace one day, Bae has been contemplating on his working process in comparison with the keyword-contamination. In this regard, the exhibition is an outcome of the introspection by the artist who has experienced consuming aspects of creation which inevitably involves collecting and discarding a large quantity of objects and materials and producing numerous by-products.
In this context, Lobster Quadrille (2020, stop motion animation, 6min 28sec), the video work which is screening throughout the show, humorously portrays the life of an unknown artist who can be a metaphoric figure of the artist himself. While producing a large number of texts and images, he has constantly questioned about what makes differences between the pieces which remained as artworks and others which ended up in the litter bin; also, he has investigated the implications of the survived texts and images and their subtle relations. The title which refers to ‘Lobster dance’ is deeply related to the images the artists conjured up when he was listening to a song included in the film OST of Alice in Wonderland (2010) by Tim Burton (b.1958). Imagining marine creatures awkwardly dancing in the polluted ocean, Bae allowed his interpretation on borders of creation and its residues, predators and prey implying the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy and the valuables and the abandoned to be the conceptual substructure of his practice. Dimly flickering, these elements delivering the artist’s intention steadily permeates the viewers’ awareness.
In terms of the technique, the exhibition is significant as Bae attempts to apply a new painting technique developed from the prior modes which experimented with graffiti-styles with his original rhythmical strokes. The new multiple-sized paintings whose solemn touch reminds us of Realism works of art depict close-up scenes of which animals such as a lion or a deer consume other creatures. Sensitively responding to the surrounding light, the glossy surface of the paintings increases the depth of light and shade.
Bae Yoon Hwan (b.1983) received a BFA from Seowon University and an MFA in Kyungwon University, Korea. He was on the shortlist of The 36th Joongang Art Competition Grand Prix, known as the gateway to the Korean emerging artists, and his growing presence as one of the new generation Korean painters is discovered in several exhibitions at the major museums including Seoul Museum of Art (Digital Promenade, 2018; Emerging Artist, 2015), Daegu Art Museum (2015), Arko Art Center (2014), Cheongju Museum of Art (2017) and Jeju Museum of Art (2019).
