Seon ghi bahk biography

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그의 작품은 인간의 감성과 시각에서 출발한다. He has held 33 solo exhibitions, starting with Gallery Seoho in 1994, and participated in numerous group exhibitions held in Seoul, Busan, Zurich, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai Basel, and more. It is only with this focus on transience that we can begin to consider permanence.

Apparently floating in a play of light and space, his installations embody the relationship between humans and nature.

Charcoal, Bahk's favourite material, is deeply rooted in the traditions of his home country, where it is used in daily purification rituals. 작가는 숯이라는 재료가 가진 물성이 모여 만들어내는 형태를 선보이며, 공중에 띄우는 방법으로 작품을 공간에 직접 개입시켜 공간과 상호작용하도록 만든다.

Therefore, the material of all my works is wood, nothing else."  Bahk Seon-Ghi continues, “It (my work) is a continuation of endless penance and agony.  What I find most challenging is how to find out a method to visually manifest my thoughts.  The most painful moment is the struggle to find a methodological solution.  Nonetheless, works created after such agony and hard thinking build energy and momentum for the next creation."  This statement tells us what we need to know to understand his works.  The most-talked-about of his works are of charcoal.  Given the seemingly endless pain Bahk undergoes before creating another charcoal installation, the objets or materials used for his work are far too special to be considered universal.  The fact that charcoal itself becomes objects of remarkable artworks makes Bahk's works extraordinary.  Even so, we need not to accord great significance to the conventional concept or meaning of charcoal.  Bahk chose charcoal as an objet for his artwork without attaching philosophical meaning to it.

Bahk was born in Seonsan, Gyeongsangbuk-do Province.  His hometown was a very small hamlet of only a few households deep in the mountains.  Everything around Bahk was nature itself, and the mountains, winds, and trees naturally came to him.  Bahk took especial interest in trees and wind.  He wanted to express nature, which he had seen most closely.  After deeply considering what from nature he should use as subjects for his artwork, he started with trees because they felt more familiar and were easier to depict than mountains or winds, and he finally arrived at the material called charcoal.  And yet, he has not given up the essence of trees, which can be seen intermittently in his later works.  As if proving the theory of Claude Levi-Strauss, an eminent French anthropologist who argued that man cannot help but be influenced by the environment he or she was born into, Bahk has gradually built his theory on charcoal: he started verifying the reasons and meanings why generation of charcoal, that is, wood, became the primary motif for his work. 

It was in the late 1980s that he began working with charcoal full-time.  He was more interested in hanging charcoal than laying it down.  The reason was rather simple.  To hang an objet by a strand allows an artist much greater freedom from constraint in installation work than to attach it to the floor or walls.  By starting with trees followed by two stages of production and installation, Bahk has achieved two objectives.  One was to dominate the space with his work and the other was to find the cycle of nature - generation and extinction - during the transformation process of wood into charcoal while elevating the material as an objet.  With pieces of black charcoal hanging by transparent nylon threads, Bahk's charcoal installation works are acclaimed by art critics and collectors both at home and abroad as pieces of Oriental painting or abstract artwork in spirit. 

Bahk has pursued diversity and open-mindedness as he moves forward.  Rather than adhering consistently to one direction, he engages in several different styles as he unfolds his works.  Of course, the atmosphere and nature of his works differ from each other according to the style of the work.  Bahk's two signature types of works ?

The artist showcases forms created by the prope rties of charcoal, intervening directly in the space by suspending the artwork in the air to interact with the environment. In this regard, we are reminded of the blank spaces in Korean ink paintings of water and mountains.

Bahk's de-contextualisation and magnification of objects recalls some elements of Pop Art.

The artist's medium – matt-black pieces of energy-rich material – gestures towards the Italian Arte Povera movement, e.g. The focus of this exhibition is on oversized drops of water falling to the ground; they are naturalistically distorted according to the physical law of gravity. Like the vanitas theme of classical art history, the burnt organic matter reminds us of death – and of life after death.

 또한 관람자의 시점에 따라 작품의 형태가 변화하는 시각적 체험을 가능하게 한다.

"Without doubt, the most important value in an artwork is depth," says Bahk Seon-ghi.  The most fundamental reason viewers stay in place in front of his work is well expressed in Bahk's monologue: "I want my audience to experience the joyful disorientation brought by visual fabrication and calculated optical illusion."

Jong-geun KIM (Art critic, Adjunct Professor of Hongik University, Director of K-artist Project)