Bae Sung Ho: Graft

ChapterII is delighted to announce GRAFT, a solo exhibition of works by Bae Sung-ho, from November 19 to December 31, 2025 in Yeonnam-dong, Seoul.

Bae Sung-ho demonstrates an artistic practice that reveals and reconstructs the boundaries between objects and existence through the repetitive process of collecting, dismantling, and reassembling. In this exhibition, he presents work that explores the adaptation and modes of existence of surrogate lifeforms by combining discarded dolls, CT skeletal data, and clinical and ritualistic objects made from materials of diverse origins.

Artist’s Statement (2025)

The act of keeping things becomes a point of departure. Moving between collecting and foraging, accumulated specimens and artifacts including secondhand plushies, discarded stuffed animals, ritual objects, and isolation devices form the material field through which latent rules and operations come into view. When their intended contexts are set aside, arrangements of fragments and gaps emerge and another order begins to organize itself. Iterative cycles of disassembly and reassembly turn a single exterior into layered cross-sections that disclose the fractures and internal logics embedded within. The shifting rhythm between separation and attachment relocates relations and generates forms that move along the threshold between the human and the non-human.

Stuffed animals salvaged from waste sites, CT-based skeletal data, and objects drawn from clinical or ritual settings are reconfigured as units that operate across uneven scales and temporal registers. These configurations mediate remnants and temporarily reestablish severed relations, extending forensic reconstruction into a modified procedural space. Constructing a face that has no historical origin and exists only as an extinct possibility requires following traces that cannot be recovered through skeletal information alone. The gaps between these traces form an allegorical framework. In this sense, allegory functions as a structural device for describing the transition between the living and the non-living. The discarded plush carries both material presence and a posthumous mark, and the processes of cutting and suturing operate as technical means through which this dual condition is sustained.

Plush toys modeled after Frankenstein’s creature mark a divergence between attachment and the uncanny. Once the monster’s estrangement was neutralized by commodified cuteness, its uncanniness became desaturated. The work seeks to recover this desaturated strangeness as a structural condition. Through repeated sequences of dissection and re-stitching, units derived from the same prototype undergo material stresses that produce discrete variations. Engineered cuteness and symbolic grotesqueness intersect and shift across one another, and the removal or compression of particular traits expands heterogeneity within the group. The creature’s singularity becomes clearer through the accumulation of these mutations.

Zombie plush toys that have been sterilized through their commodity imaging are reconstituted into architectural configurations once dismantled. Contagion unfolds through the logic of structural replication rather than through touch, and surfaces adopt strategies of camouflage. Bio-safety gloves affixed to exterior layers register a tactile presence while simultaneously enforcing complete restriction. This configuration articulates safety while suppressing access to sensation. Within this field, the restoration of remnants, the simulation of sensory cues, and the proliferation of variations occur together and diverge through ongoing structural iterations.