Convexconcave
Bae Bien-U, Convexconcave
From →
Antwerp
Pictures of the exhibition
Bae Bien-U, Convexconcave
From →
Antwerp
Story of the exhibition
For Bae Bien-U, taking a picture is much more than making a literal representation of a passive object. The object is not something that needs to be captured for the sake of a piercing gaze. On the contrary, Bae feels obliged towards it, adopts a humble attitude and allows himself to be absorbed by it. On film, he intends to eternalise a brief feeling of oneness with his object—or rather with its emotion. In fact, the one and only “object” of his photographs is a universal, emotional condition of oneness and perfect unity with nature, of which he himself is a part.
The works included in ConvexConcave derived from his approach to landscape photography in his Oreum series. He’s inspired by the similarity between the concave and convex lines or contours of the human body, and the landscapes he photographs. A text called “Bae, Bien-U - Nature that is called body”, written by Chiba Shigeo, analyses this idea. Shigeo describes how Bae Bien-U’s work is so unique as he is able to “see nature with his body not just with his eyes.”
Bae’s photographic journey began under the influence of American landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, and the writings of the Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy. After extensive travels and searching for traditional painters of the Far East, he became convinced that it’s the natural environment and tradition of the place where an artist lives that forges his unique artistic vision.
Bae Bien-U’s photographic journey in his twenties gradually moved from focusing on the natural environment of Korea to more specific features like Korean pine trees, the oreums (parasite volcanoes), the sea and the sky of Jeju island in Korea, the Jongmyo royal ancestral shrine, and many others.
Bae returns to the same places over and over again, in order to photograph different parts of the same landscape. Photography for him is a ritual, a meditation. This ritualistic approach intensifies the relation with his object and helps him find its true essence and meaning. It brings him to another dimension, in which he can communicate with his surroundings without the objectifying boundaries of time and space.
Although Bae Bien-U takes pictures of many different things, his talent comes out most clearly when he encounters "nature", such as pine trees, flowering plants, sea, mountains, islands, et cetera. To be specific, when he pictures the earth, sky, mountains, sea or water, trees or plants or flowers, his photos become something very rare. Rather than saying that he tries to photograph nature, one may say that "nature" sent Bae Bien-U to the world of mortals. Nature is trying to show, no, display itself through him. (Chiba Shigeo)