BAIK Hyunjhin: Vagrant N' Substance
ARARIO SEOUL is pleased introduce the third exhibition of the year 2008, artist Hyunjhin Baik's solo exhibition "Vagrant N' Substance". Hyunjhin Baik, who has built a dynamic artistic language presenting drawings depicting a chain of organisms through his drawing series, has been working on drawings containing its own stories through completing the unrealistic space joining conceptual forms. The solo exhibition at ARARIO SEOUL will not only exhibit the artist's existing drawings, but also, huge wall-covering paintings and numerous numbers of new paintings in a labyrinth-like space covering all of the art world of the artist has built until now.
Baik's paintings, on a glance, are constellated by figures knowing different statues of emersion from the ambivalent backgrounds and informal abstract expressionistic color fields. But on a closer look, subjects, humans and quasi-humans are depicted in their very form, frontally, on the side, standing, seated or simply in some shaded metonymy, where body parts and limbs, still mainly faces, appear to float within the painted space, upon the painting surface. Identity is somehow denied, and personal qualities and recognition are negated by replacing the facial connotations with highly stylized patterns like dots or crosses for eyes and lines or vacuous apertures for mouths. Expressions evolve into sculptural imperatives or dynamic suggestions of movement, breathing exhalation into color words, unspoken, into shapes. Background and foreground battle vividly to dominate attention and alternately win over with a relative predominance of the figurative upon the abstract and vice versa.
The complex works of multiple elements are much like the artist himself. Baik, who was a sculpture-major at Hongik University then a lead vocal singer of an underground band called "Uh-Uh-Boo Project" is a true multi talented artist who knows no restriction to his own varied creativity; succeeding in diverse artistic fields, from poetry to experimental musical research and performance, to visual arts. Baik juggles different painting attitudes; he has easiness in incorporating apparently incongruous signs and painting styles, from physical thick brushstrokes, to thin transparent layers, from indented details to sculptural large and potent splashes. The artist's self sufficient artistic system functions as a prolific organism regularly fed by spontaneous but truly devotional daily attention to his own practice and its praxis. He launches into both progressive self teaching and purely incidental affairs according them his just attention as illuminated by introspection and consequent projection of the inner self onto the external world. Thus, the tile of the exhibition, "Vagrant N' Substance" not only best speaks for his works, but also the artist himself, who absorbs various mediums of art into his world.
Baik's new album "Time of Reflection" and the artbook "ORGANISM MECHANISM BLURISM" released along with the exhibition will serve as another medium to further understand the artist who practices a unique language of the arts. And regardless of the album and the artbook, surely any beholder would appreciate Baik's painterly and gestural ability, his profound understanding of the nature of color and its special and atmospheric synthesis of constructive balance of a hierarchical inner structure here at labyrinth-turned ARARIO SEOUL.
